Be sure to check out the talented food writers and video producers we interviewed for this video - their links are in the description! But the real questions is: did Melissa convince you to stop finding online recipes so annoying? Let us know :)
I've read all the backgrounds first on Third Culture Kitchen. Recipe layout is superior. Will wait until autumn to make the recipes, pretty warm here at 40.35°S at the moment.
She absolutely didn't, because it is annoying for anyone that is prioritizing trying to find ideas for things they can make, which is the majority of people. Yeah, writing is hard. Making good recipes is hard. Yes, you deserve recognition for doing either, but expecting the same people that just want to find a good recipe to care in that moment about the full experience of coming up with the recipe is...not realistic. If you had to listen to the life story of every construction worker that worked on the road you want to drive on, you'd wear ear plugs. Same goes here.
Check out Luke Smith's based cooking. He was tired of this very same issue, so recipes are only ingredients and directions. The picture has to be a real picture of the thing you made, and that's it, no trackers, no ads, etc. His video was posted 3 years ago.
"The recipe goes first, and the life story stuff goes after that" is exactly the solution I personally want. I would like to NOT have to constantly scroll down when my browser decides to reload the page mid meal prep.
Oh, and don't forget when you're halfway scrolled through a long af paragraph, and the ads finally catch up and suddenly you're looking at an F150 and your paragraph is now one of ten super long paragraphs so you don't even know where you were, until, oh, hey, now it's a damned Chevy that popped up because I guess that other ad wasn't the only one still loading. But you can't even just sit and wait a minute for all of them to load because they'd rather wait and then pop up on you when you get to them.
I like the cultural backstory and personal backstory and I love the tips and tricks. I just don't want it to be a meter of scrolling only to then see that I don't have the ingredients I need and I have to find a different recipe. also if there's an ad between the ingredients list and the instructions I'm much much less likely to use that site again, I need those to be next to each other
The actual issue Sabrina's Website fixed was never actually addressed in the video. It is definitely important have the extra information of technique and culture, and I want the hard working chefs to get paid. But in an effort to monetize on the Chef's hard work, they create a genuinely BAD user experience. There has to be a better way than blasting you with so many adds you can't even scroll the screen down on your phone.
i agree-- despite the fact tht the direction that they took was entertaining (15:16 -ish onwards), i wish they explored this nuance more about how to chefs/food-bloggers should be able to share their recipes without resorting to blasting you with adverts and popups. but yknow. we live in a society and all that, lmao
it used to be fine because you could put one or two ads on a page and they didnt have to be video ads. but these days mysteriously every content creator and influencer has been getting less hits for commissions on companies websites. it couldn't be at all because of chrome extensions that swipe those commissions by offering coupon codes or anything like that.
There is a better way. Thera are a few bloggers/chef that have figured that out. It's called creating two pages. One for the culture and what not. And the other for the recipe and any techniques that are important for the recipe/
@@bhangela I mean you can just buy cookbooks? I feel like getting them money isn't hard, the problem is getting them money without paying or inconveniencing yourself at all, and tbh that just seems like an untenable goal
Best order for a recipe site: 1 - ingredients and equipment you'll need 2 - basic instructions 3 - step by step instructions with things to watch out for (you could get fancy and have these expand out from the basic instruction on click/tap) 4 - "Thank you for trying my dish, now here is a the story of this dish to read while you eat it:" (all the long winded stuff that doesn't actually have to do with cooking the thing).
Perfection! All of it matters, but not all of it matters to the cooking portion. The flow of the page should match the desired flow of the experience. This layout would create a page I would not only visit, but return to, and actually make the recipes from.
This is the best order, and if anyone ACTUALLY cares about the origins of the recipe, they WILL read it. At the same time, you don't alienate the readers who don't care and just want to make a meal.
I would add alternative edition for example if you don't have certain equipment the best option to use as it is the has the most probability of the majority of people having access. With what using that equipment will change in the recipe. Ingredients swaps and if any changes needed to be done if use. For example some ingredients can be easily swapped without much changes in the final product, you can add changes if making for specific dietary restrictions for example gluten-free, dairy free, if they are allergic to certain foods if a suitable substitute can be found including it. You don't have to write about every substitute variations in food ingredients replacement or every equipment versions. Just the best ones to use if you are switching something in the recipe. Then offer both measurements used in cooking, You could even put tips and tricks in making the recipe. You can even do so much like listing a simple identification on where you got your ingredients and equipment.
The issue, to my mind, is that the recipe blogger who is offended if people skip the intro has assumed a social contract to which most of the recipe-seekers did not (and are not interested in) agreeing. Most readers likely aren't regular blog readers who are interested in story/connection anymore. No one is entitled to a successful business, particularly if its fundamental model is giving away the product for free. It's disingenuous to suggest that the super long scroll-down is anything but for ads and SEO. Multiple paragraph stories don't make a recipe easier to comprehend or cook successfully. They're just filler that is designed to make the blog money. Most printed cookbooks have a recipe blurb that's 2-3 sentences at most and the actual ingredients/instructions appear on the same page. If a recipe is well-written and well-tested, it doesn't need more than that.
yeah I hate how this video is pretending like there's any actual useful information in the pre amble. It's just there so they can show you more ads, and that's all it's ever been for. Also in this day and age, you can find recipes for anything for free. Acting like someone uploading a new recipe means they deserve to be paid is kinda ridiculous...
@@connor1586 because we're in the era of the internet where thousands of people have already uploaded every possible variation of the recipe you could think of. Do you expect to be paid when you upload a tutorial to your RUclips channel that's already been made thousands of times? I think they should be reimbursed, but I don't think that it's something reasonable to expect nowadays
@connor1586 The issue is not that they want to be reimbursed for their efforts, but that they're suggesting the SEO/ad space is a vital part of the recipe. It's not; it's their business model to make the blog worth their time. The whole point of the comparison to a printed cookbook is that with a different model to make money, it's clear that the blah-blah pre-amble is unnecessary for recipe success.
13:42 This is such a bad take - if there are "tips and tricks" outside of regular cooking skills that the person needs to know to make your recipe, and you don't include it in the recipe but rather the conversational blog entry that accompanies it, that's a failure to write a proper recipe. If the person reading it needs to know how to butterfly a turkey for a recipe, you include that. These takes are from people who are cooks first and writers second, and it shows.
I also am not super convinced that all of these tips and tricks are included in the story part of the recipe. For example, 13:54 "Do you know what the test is [for being properly cooked]? They just have to slide off the fork." This could (should?) be included in the recipe part, and doesn't make sense in the the story part ... unless the story says something like "My nana always made this dish, and we knew the potatoes were fully cooked when they just slid off the fork" which honestly seems weird and sounds more like AI wrote it. (I'm not sure if that's potatoes or not, so I'm just using that as a placeholder.)
There does have to be an assumption of knowledge when you write a recipe. If I have to include how to cut an onion for every time I say "one onion, diced" the recipe would still go on forever. See also things like how to cut potatoes if your hands hurt, where you can stop in the process if your kid/dog starts freaking out, what to use if you thought you had beef broth but it's actually shrimp broth.
@ I agree that there has to be an assumption of general knowledge. Doesn't this weaken the claim that "helpful tips" might be included in the story bit, then? If it's important enough to include in the story part, shouldn't it be important enough to include in the recipe? (And if it's assumed to be sufficiently common knowledge, then why does it need to be included in the story at all?)
I guess I'm just unclear where the middle ground of "cooking information that isn't important enough to put into the instructions, but is important enough that it belongs in the story part" is. I could see it for substituting cookware (i.e. don't have a pot the exact right size), or maybe something like "baking the meat vs cooking in a pan will achieve roughly the same results" but even the latter of those seems like it could just be in the instructions.
I kinda disagree but not entirely. Thing is, I cook a fair bit and usually when I have a recipe, there are two stages of me working with it. Stage 1: Read the entire thing top to bottom and understand all the steps I am not familiar with yet (like butterflying a turkey, laminating dough, emulsify whatever in whatever else etc.). Stage 2: I'm actually cooking and I didn't learn the recipe by heart. I need some quick reminders what step is coming next. I think I'm not the only person working that way (?) but obviously I don't have data on this. However, there are two ways to cater to this: Either with heavy use of bold text that sets off the jist of a section or by providing one long-form recipe with all the details and tips and then another version that only lists the ingredients and then provides summarised steps as bullet points. Many online recipes do this already. My only grief with them is that they put the shortlist of steps right down at the very bottom. That way if the website reloads, if I want to cook the dish a third or fifth time, if I reopen it on another device, I have to scroll past everything every single time. Also, if I first just want to check the ingredients list to see if I have everything, same thing - scroll all the way down. I feel like all the parts of online recipes have value. Yes, even the travel blog and family biography sections. But I hate the order that they come in. It feels like someone wants me to earn their recipe by first reading through everything else.
I understand the value in the story. At the same time, I cannot absorb everyone’s story for every meal! Having the option to read AFTER the recipe would be amazing. Having the recipe to start would make me revisit the site more, so I’m not jumbling through tech issues with my phone blowing up as i scroll to find what I would need to make it
I agree 100%. I don’t mind a little context and history behind the recipe, but anything more than a paragraph is just over the top. Then you add the 50+ website breaking ads and pop up banners and you get the people visiting your website annoyed as hell when they just want the damn recipe with maybe a smidge of context
Or during! If the recipe has me watching the pot for 15 minutes to be there when something happens or lightly stirring, that's the perfect point to give me something to ready that is related the recipe. I am, however, not going to scroll back up and lose my place to ready that info.
@@ArtofcarissaThe ads are the true purpose of this structure. By pushing the recipe down the page you have to scroll through more ads, generating more income. Also SEO but that could probably work if the recipe was first.
Having a recipe cleaner doesn’t stop people who want to read those parts of the recipe from reading them. It does give those that of us that just want to get to the recipe the opportunity to avoid having to sift through a lot of stuff that we don’t want to look at to get to what we’re looking for. Not to mention the web design of a lot of these recipes is just horrible. Weird boxes all over the place ads stuffed in here and there, it’s visually torturous and just not conducive to enjoying anything.
Ads! Same reason google started to suck more and more at finding stuff! The sites make money through ads and the metric by which others are willing to pay for ads is how long people stay on your site and scroll through. So these google result pages are literally designed to be cumbersome and confusing so you stay and scroll longer. it`s not a bug it`s an intentional design feature 🤷♂
Because the other stuff generates the revenue to pay for the recipe you get for free. If you didn't scroll past them, the recipe makers wouldn't get ad revenue and so you wouldn't get your recipe
The recipe writers basically said they’re bad at writing recipe instructions. As someone learning to cook in middle-age, the tips and tricks would be great, but that’s almost never what the paragraphs are. As someone who writes medical quick reference material (where mistakes could lead to patient death), your steps should explain everything required, in as few words as possible. If context, or situational variables, or details for beginners are needed, put them *alongside* the step in a visually distinct way (and also keep them short and direct).
Plus, there's another thing too - there's this implication that if you don't know something, your first instinct is to look at the blurbs. But almost no one is doing that! If a receipt told me to cut a whole chicken for example, I'm gonna Google a video for it, I'm not gonna scroll through 8 pages to find what may not even be there. There's also the stupid stuff like the spices not being labeled. Seriously? At that point you're just FORCING the situation to prove your own point
"If you don't wanna pay for the recipe that's what you have to deal with" go to hell. The idea that paywalled information should ever exist in a world with the internet, or that someone should only have access to actual garbage information for free is absurd.
The problem isn't the tips and tricks and photos and story. The problem is the tips and tricks are spliced between ads far from the relevant step of the recipe and sprinkled between bits of backstory and just a few more ads. Give me the recipe. Give me the tips when relevant. Let me cook it. Then, if I enjoy it, maybe I'll actually check out why you made it. It's not complicated, but it's also a lot harder to force you to scroll passed all of their ads
yeah, the problem is the websites are eye bleeding garbage. So happy for ai answers for when you forget how long to boil an egg, etc and youtube for actual cooking instructions. Written recipes can definitely go extinct imho
@@Serai3 Brave Browser works, too. Better, I'd argue. Adblock used to glitch out the page for me or cause the thing not to load without disabling it. Use it for most online websites nowadays just because it makes me forget about the adpocalypse sprawling out everywhere.
I just tried to look up a recipe on a website without an ad blocker and my browser almost crashed. I don't have a problem with putting ads on sites, I get making money is needed, but when there is one every paragraph, that's excessive.
The autoplaying videos, popups, and floating banners...I bounce out of that page immediately. Ain't worth it lol. But yeah, 99.9% of the time I have an adblocker on.
@@Artofcarissa I also have this intuition, but it's so obvious of an idea that it must not actually work out, or people would already have made that switch. To be honest, even as a proponent of the idea I wouldn't actually sub to a recipe patreon. Would you?
I'll give a shit about your story after I've tasted the food and actually care. There is a Korean place near my house that I would *happily* spend hours interviewing the head chef if I could get their recipes. I don't give two shits about the recipe from the tea shop down the street over their 'family style, home made, traditional muffin.' Those muffins suck and I just don't care. Keep the tips and tricks. Throw out the narrative about Nana.
I'm a massive cookery book fan, but online recipes are incredibly irritating. The food writer suggesting that the only alternative is just writing 4 ingredients Is insane and completely makes me disregard his opinion. A little blurb is fine. But I haven't seen a little blurb on any recipes I've searched for recently.
@@_kowono Same. I would rather pay $10 for a book rather than looking for recipes online. The blurb should be a few sentences that describe the dish. Not the writers life. I dont care at all about how this dish came to be. Thats for after ive tasted it. Tell me how long the dish takes and what i need. Those are the two most important things when looking for a recipe and shouldnt be after scrolling down a mile. These bloggers are out of touch with whats actually important.
Nah, a lot of that is information that some people absolutely need, but is useless filler for everyone else. It makes sense to seperate that stuff out.
it's not though. some people will know that if the flour is too dry they need to add water and others will need to be told that. not everyone is at the same level and to write all the tips and tricks into the recipe itself would make everyone unhappy because the whole point of the recipe is to sumarize the instructions into basic steps for someone who already knows flour thats too dry needs water
I think you misunderstood him he generally was implying that the information included beside the recipe adds the reason why you would use this particular recipe instead of other recipes for the same meal. It provides it's characteristics that mark it different than all those other similar recipes.
I would like to point out two things: - I would absolutely trust a recipe that is just ingredients and instructions, without anything else, no styling, no link to the overarching website, nothing. That is how I prefer my internet. - If you speak German, public broadcasters have expansive recipe libraries on the internet. Example: NDR Ratgeber Kochen. We already pay for that, so the whole "We need to make money from this" does not apply. I feel like more of culture should be like that. The revenue should be independent from the performance of individual works.
Similarly if you speak English, BBC Good Food has a ton of recipes with no blog or ads (at least within the UK - I know the BBC tends to add ads when accessing outside of the UK)
I was also confused by the idea that writing a bunch of stuff to scroll past builds credibility. Decent web design can, I guess, but a reasonably-professional looking website with just the recipe would seem incredibly legit to me, and they do exist. And even an unprofessional-looking website or a reddit post with just the recipe seems like it has potential, and if there are comments with people's positive experiences with the recipe, that would be what would build its credibility to me.
I concur. Especially if it's something simple. If I'm forgetful and can't remember how long to soft boil an egg, I don't need any additoinal information than time for each size. If I want to make a basic Tiramisu, all I need is ingredients and steps. If I want the best Tiramisu in the world, I will need additional tips, like which way to dip the ladyfingers in the coffee, maybe what coffee is the best of it, and so on, and maybe if I'm trying to make the best Tiramisu, I'm so much into it that I'm also interested in reading about its history and how the author came up with this specific way of making it, I'll happily read it. But if I'm making the simple version, that probably means I want something easy, fast and perhaps I'm not that interested in diving deep into the lore of it, and certainly not at the very moment when I'm trying to read the instructions to know if I have all the ingredients and kitchen equipment
Not only culture. Imagine a world in which the provision of housing is a communal task and not something you can make a profit from. Or the provision of an internet connection.
I wonder how much is cultural. I'm Polish in Australia, Polish are to the point, Australians beat around the bush until the leaves fall off and get mad that you didn't guess the point that they never specifcally said. It's ... confusing. But my guess is that they prefer the rambly recipe, and will trust it more. I will not. Why is your recipe so bad that you need to CONVINCE me first? No. Just give me the recipe.
I don't know man, I transcribed most of my family recipes for my own use and included just ingredients and very light instructions. For all the baking stuff I legit just have ingredient proportions, oven temp and baking time, no other instructions because that's all I need since I've made these recipes tons of times. It shouldn't be the job of every individually written recipe to teach you all of the fundamentals of cooking like how to dice an onion or carve a chicken. We also live in the realm of the interent where you can legit just write "carve chicken" and hyperlink to a tutorial that covers that for those who don't know how but isn't intrusive to those who do. Lastly, most of the struggles Sabrina was having with Melissa's recipe wasn't because of the missing historical context, but it was because the ingredients weren't labled and the measurments weren't standard (instead of pinch of salt, either say salt to taste or 1 tsp, instead of stewing chunk write 1 in chunks). If the individual "tips and tricks" part are essential for the result (like blooming the spices or soaking the rice), they should be included in the instructions. That's the whole point of the instructions. I think most of the commenteres here agree that we don't want these recipe writers to not get paid, and we don't want to lose the cultural significance of these recipes, but we should definitely have the ingredients, measurements and core instructions at the top.
Yeah, this “experiment” is flawed from the start, since the tips and tricks section solves a problem that it itself created to justify its own existence. It also asumes that the people cooking the recipe will be too lazy to open an extra tab, but not lazy enough to cook a dish by themselves. Moreover, even if the experiment had completely and undoubtedly justified the existence of tips and tricks, it still doesn’t justify the existence of the story part of the recipe, the part people complain about the most, since it doesn’t add any physical value to the food and, coupled with ads, makes the page ungodly to navigate, especially on smartphones, which are the main tool people use to look up recipes in the modern age
Also has anyone noticed how the cooking challenge was weighted against Sabrina? Melissa handed her unlabeled spices and had he cook with boned chicken that wasn’t pre- butchered. And then Melissa stepped in to help. If you wanted to prove how important those stories were you should have handed her the recipes ‘story’ and see if she could have found those tips and tricks!
Yeah, since she talked so much about being new to writing recipes, I was curious how well written Melissa’s recipe actually was BEFORE the website scraped the information
I noticed Melissa's blog features a custom font called Melissa Serif (which I can only assume is her handwriting) and I just wanted to say I really appreciate the personal touch and I think it's kind of connected to her whole point.
This glossed over ad sales. That's the reason I'm scrolling past 1000 words on their genealogy or world travels. Also the reason "jump to the recipe" literally scrolls down the page past the ads. Recipe writers and bloggers need to get paid but also the current status quo is extreme.
I don't know why everyone buys into the argument that everything people do on the internet needs to be paid. No it doesn't. People do their hobbies for free all of the time, in fact it is common for people to paid to show off their hobbies. That is why thy ad-hawking recipe writers do all that SEO. They need to use internet aggression to hide the free stuff. Recipe sharing on the internet pre-dates the internet advertisement.
@@Millionsofpeas These are people who do it as a job, not the hobbyists. You won't find a hobbyist on your first few pages of the search engine unless you're searching for something very bespoke
14:50 It feels disingenuous to claim that the life story will improve how you cook the food. That simply isn't the case, if there is something in the story that actually impacts how you prepare the meal it's an INSTRUCTION and should be found... in the instructions. It's fine for instructions to include things other than "put flour in the bowl" or "stir it" - they can be more complicated like "add flour until the dough isn't sticky anymore." I don't need to know about that one time as a kid when your mom made this and the dough was sticking to your hands and she told you that is because there isn't enough flour in it yet. Just explain the relevant part, leave out the story. Nobody is saying that a recipe shouldn't include information about how to perform the steps or why it's done. But it shouldn't include information that doesn't help you make the food.
@@bhangela Lord_zeel never said that they were against people putting their stories in, but that hiding instruction in background details and pretending it is what makes the recipe better is disingenuous.
@@Pumpky_the_kobold "Just explain the relevant part, leave out the story. Nobody is saying that a recipe shouldn't include information about how to perform the steps or why it's done. But it shouldn't include information that doesn't help you make the food." For most of the comment you're right but at the end they make it pretty clear they don't want the story at all.
@@bhangela "You are trying to attract people to your site to make ad revenue, you cannot be upset that people want the stuff they were looking for instead of your holiday stories."
10:30 onwards feels like the weirdest red herring that don't address the complaint of many people actually just wanting the actual recipie because that's all they need. Saying effectively "Some tips buried in the SEO slop will help people who don't know how to cook" is....baffling. Nobody wants important info left out of a recipe. The problem is that important info, including the recipe itself is berried in a massive page. You showed one of them. It was unreadable.
This is the first video i felt iffy on. We're not saying don't include a bit of your past, but it isn't IMPORTANT to how to MAKE the recipe. The tips and tricks? IMPORTANT. i don't understand how the original point sabrina had got so lost in translation. Sabrina also never advocated for vague recipes. No one does!
Sometimes those tips are like, "If your onions are browning a little too fast, you may want to add extra oil." How fast is too fast? How much extra oil? How do you even know this tip is for you? This would be a bad inclusion in the formal recipe because of those questions. I've seen pages with "tips and tricks" sections at the bottom where that could go, but you can't really include too many of them in a section like that, so it's not necessarily good to do those either, but they can help. I can also see the background info including variations could be really helpful too. These aren't necessarily all going to fit in the printable recipe, and they're not going to be valuable to every cook, but for some, they are. Also, Melissa is talking about tips and tricks here, but I also think if someone is in the mood for a whole experience, they may like to imagine this family eating this meal in some other place, at some other time. That does have value for some people. (Also, if you particularly hate an ingredient, like I do with one, you can sometimes tell from the writing that this person really likes that thing, and you can know to avoid their recipes.)
They often have notes on certain ingredients that can be hard to find or are unusual and notes on certain techniques. Like the timing of when you should add things or what you are looking for.
"you want to take away their ads". Yes, yes i do. It has actually been proven that adblockers are environmentally friendly because your computer doesnt have to waste the additional power to generate a bunch of extra, lets be honest, bloatware.
Not to mention the viruses given that no one vets ads or their content. Our collective social promotion of people getting paid through ads when they aren't regulated well or almost at all is absolutely nonsense.
indeed! the internet is so cluttered with ads and people trying to drain all your attention while shoving products in your face constantly.... Not enough people talk about this, but I swear that there must be a strong correlation between this stuff and declines in mental health.
The life story doesn't exist for humans to read, it's for SEO. The Web pages are essentially an inefficient ad data feed between machines that humans are a scoring mechanism for.
Yep, if genuinely important aspects of the recipe or preparation process are buried in a multi-paragraph blurb, you've simply written your recipe incorrectly.
Yeah a few short paragraphs or one long paragraph is all I have patience for. Anything more than that and it’s overkill. If I scroll for more than 2 seconds and I’m not at the recipe yet that shit sucks
I'm with Sabrina on this one.. I'm a home cook and studied a bit of cooking, but I'm mainly a developer, and all I have to say is: if you need context, tips and tricks, then the recipe is not correctly written. You can let go of the recipe when you know the recipe as the back of your hand. You have done it SO MANY TIMES that you no longer think about measuring, you can see the proper amount. And it is then that you can modify the recipe to make it your own. But (yes, there is a but), one point is made in the video, someone needs to be paid if you make a website. That is the only point I agree with having ads (though annoying). Other than that, if I want the history, the background, and the context of why the recipe exists, I rather watch cooking shows.
I'm with you fully on this. Sabrina not being able to follow Melissa's instructions doesn't mean that we need the blog, it means that the instructions weren't thoroughly enough. I've written instructions for drug testing, writing good instructions is very much a skill that needs to be developed and good instructions are written in a way where they're clear to people who aren't intimately familiar with the method you're writing for whether it's cooking, home improvement, car maintenance, or chemistry.
I agree! All of that extra info should written into the recipe itself. Not strewn about with your life story. Cooking instruction belongs in the recipe.
Were you not around for the early internet? No, these people just do not need to be paid. People will do everything on the internet at their cost because they just like to on the internet. Internet is where we do our hobbies for free. In fact, free websites are the only websites on the internet that consistently have a good user experience.
"Someone needs to get paid" overlooks the competitive game that is SEO. Many of these recipe sites only exist to take recipes that already exist and slap ads on them. They're not adding anything new to the web, they're just displacing some other copy of the same recipe in the search engine rankings. The innovation is not in the quality of the recipe, but in the efficiency of collecting ad revenue.
If you can’t work with just the instructions, then it’s not a complete recipe. And what this leaves out is that I often have an idea of what I’m going to make and why I want it before I go to a food blog recipe. I don’t need the story about nana, because I already have the story of what I want from the recipe. I’m usually there to figure out the key ingredients to see what I missed, and to get a quick idea of what techniques I need to use in the instructions. I often compare three or four recipes, and I don’t want to read every one of those blogs. And yes, I am a ChefSteps subscriber… and I have a huge book from America’s Test Kitchen.
I guess I don't mind the ending "truce" but this video rubbed me the wrong way. People are frustrated because recipe websites have become borderline unusable. If that's how you make your money, good on you, but I've had to leave recipe blogs because I couldn't get to the recipe. How much am I supposed to appreciate the story behind your dish, when your website refreshes on me halfway through scrolling? It's always an awful experience now. Also, if you need an essay of "tips and tricks", you should probably just include them in your recipe. Also, what was with that cooking sequence? Not recognizing the spices? Is there a tip for recognizing spices in the tips section? This whole video smells like food blog propaganda lol
The people were definitely trying to guilt trip you into reading their articles before the recipe. If I wanted to read anything except the recipe, I would. Don't try and act like your copied-copied-copied recipe deserves to be preceded by your expensive honeymoon story while also your story is God's gift.
@@beefymcskillet5601 If they do that, nobody wants to pay for "below the fold" ad spots. Melissa doesn't seem to understand that for most recipe sites, they really are trying to pad for ad space, and weave the recipe into the rest of the BS just to make it so you HAVE to scroll. Pay-per-impression ads know if they've been seen.
Recipes sites are 95% ads and bs. Soon it they all will also be 100% AI, possibly with 100% AI generated BS "family history" of the recipes. You don't need seperate "tips and tricks" outside of the directions as they should be in the directions if they are needed. Most don't even have "tips and tricks".
I'm against the paragraphs upon paragraphs of backstory and the inconvenient layout most of the sites have, _but_ this video has convinced me about the value of the Tips and Tricks. The recipe instructions are just the steps, but some of the steps might include stuff you've never done before, so that's where the tips come in. Once you've learned _how_ to do the step you don't need such a detailed explanation every time you come back to the recipe, so it's actually pretty handy that it's separate. It just needs to be nearer the instructions, not a million miles away with ads in between. Maybe even with optional pop-ups inlined into the instructions - though obviously that's web design beyond the scope of the average blogger.
15:45 … but these are two people who know one another well. I don’t know the person who wrote hollandaise crab rangoon poppers or care how it reminds them of their cousins’ house.
Yeah, no. If important information is missing from the instructions, the recipe is written badly. I appreciate your history, but sometimes I just want to eat.
Sorry, but the only thing I took away from this video is that recipe writers are incredibly defensive when called out over the fact that they don't understand why people look up recipes. Put up a list of ingredients with exact measurements, nothing ambiguous and describe the steps of how to prepare the food. Your "tips" are the things you compile under "techniques", things you can apply in various situations to prepare various foods in a similar manner. Then you write that down once and link to it whenever applicable. You're on the world wide web, use the most fundamental aspect of it, hyperlinks!
That was my reaction too, awful seeing people defend what is essentially an exercise in wasting people's time, because at that point they've already admitted that the viewer doesn't want to see the background. It's people defending crappy industry practices.
this was what i got too, all their points were weird ways of phrasing "I'm bad at writing recipes so I'll blame you if you can't follow my ramble" ... what ?!
All the tips and tricks should be included in the recipe and should not be hidden in a novel. The recipe should be written, like with any instructions, with the mindset that the reader has never done any of it before. So they need to be clear and precise. Proper measurements need to be included too. I get that in professional settings, quantities vary because there are things the chef knows about what needs adjustment, but these recipes should be for people that don't know. And once someone has made the dish a few times they will then start knowing what needs adjustments and can play around with the quantities themselves The long format instructions shouldn't deviate from the shortened bullet point ones either. Like changing the order an ingredient goes in as you have already started cooking. And a little background on the dish is appreciated, but so many online recipes contain completely useless and irrelevant ramblings that have nothing to do with the dish.
Tips and tricks may or may not be relevant depending on your ability and knowledge. Also, some things don't make sense in either ingredients or instructions. For example, common errors. Stuff like "if it looks like X, it was probably Y" needs to be separate
At this point I refuse to Google recipes in English. I prefer German recipe websites because it gets to the point so quickly. If I want to read the background story to a dish, I want to read that after I make it. If I don't know how to prepare something or a term is unfamiliar to me, I can just... Google it. The same way I found the recipe in the first place. So to answer the question, no, I'm not convinced to find online recipes less annoying. If anything, I'm more annoyed than when I watched it. The issue isn't about people not getting their fair pay, it's about actively hindering the user experience. These websites are so poorly laid out and impossible to comfortably navigate that I don't like to Google recipes. I borrow cookbooks from friends or roommates, and I write down recipes that my friends make which I enjoy.
This has the same vibe and pitfalls of hardcore Linux users explaining to new computer users why they should care about the license of their media codec, GPU drivers, install shell plugins, compile the kernel modules in their own image and accept the user experience inconveniences as THE authentic experience of being "proper" Linux users, and only drive away people from using Linux in the process, who'd otherwise be happy with just a functional web browser. The recipe blurbs may be a creative expression for and by the people, for whom cooking is a creative outlet; but when someone just wants to cook a meal for a change, that just gets in the way.
So when I look up a recipe, I really don't have time to read a 20-page synopsis on how and where the recipe was invented. I just need the recipe. If I can't jump to the recipe, I click off that recipe and go to another. If it turns out to be a great dish, then I might go back and read.
The compromise here, put the story after the recipe not before it. Especially when the reality is most of the time its there to add important keywords for search engine optimization
Especially when so many times you scroll past all that bs and find, "adapted from: [actual recipe creator]" so they stole someone else's work and just 'tweaked' it with an extra dash of vanilla or reduced salt from 1/2tsp to 1/4tsp.
@@DreadDeimos It's because the ones here are 'chefs' not 'cooks'. Chefs think of food as art blah blah blah, whereas a cook is just interested in cooking a meal. Most people looking for recipes just want to cook a meal to eat, not go on a pretentious emotional experience.
Yes, I do the same thing except for going back to read it. I had never read the story of a recipe. When I come back to the same page, it's only because the recipe was good and I want to do it again!
Yeah that website isn't really a valid argument against the annoyance with recipe websites. The annoying ones have many obnoxious ads, and are entire novels worth of irrelevant search engine optimisation and self exposition. I will admit I never read the fluff prior to websites, I always scroll past it.
@@op4000exe The classic SEO chocolate chip cookie recipe, My grandma made the Best Chocolate Chip Cookies because she just loved finding Chocolate Chip Cookie recipes and trying out any of the Best Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe she could find. I value that she found the Best Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe and would always make it for me during holidays, birthdays, graduation, any time I needed the Best Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe.
Mike Rugnetta calls the tiny amount of text you get between ads on mobile websites "the content slit." If I'm making something off of a recipe website, I do not want to peer through the content slit.
These food writers complaints about not getting the specific instructions for a "pinch" or "chunk" from the instructions section, just says they don't know how to provide INSTRUCTIONS! If my math teacher gave me that level of explanation of algebra, I wouldn't know how to do it.
And it can matter a ton depending on the recipe. Yeah sometimes that extra pinch of salt is negligible. But other times even that little bit extra makes a huge difference. I get annoyed when I ask my mom for recipes and it's all a pinch of this and dash of that and then it turns out disgusting because nothing is actually measured. If there's at least a video then you can see what THEY consider a pinch or a dash or whatever.
I can understand complaining about "chunks" but for "pinch" essentially assume add to taste. Legitimately if the recipe has written "pinch" the actual quantity doesn't matter much
I find it very interesting that they challenged her to cook the recipe, and then, when she arrived, she found nothing was labeled and proceeded to cook it on a whim, practically setting herself up for failure.
I think the recipe writers who adds alot of this stuff is misunderstanding the purpose of a recipe. It is a much more utilitarian medium is the vast majority of people.
On one hand: This video did a great job of changing my mind that there is value in the blurbs that come before the recipe. On the other hand: When that blurb is actually 10 paragraphs where each paragraph is separated by a image as wide as the main column and an ad, yeah no, screw that, give me the recipe, lol. EDIT: Holy crap, I just randomly searched for jambalaya recipes to try an experiment to average how many scrolls it took me to reach the recipe, and I've thrown that out in favor of one very clear complaint: Why are so many of these images taking up almost all the vertical height of my monitor?! An image alone shouldn't add an entire scroll to the count!
I like how they all gave some flowery excuse as to why the blog actually brings value... and then at the end, they just go "We need it for SEO and ad revenue, deal with it". Lmao ok. I block ads and just scroll straight down anyways.
it's both though. things can have multiple layers to them and multiple reasons. there is use in the top tips, some people may get inspiration from hearing the stories. it cant just be ad revenue because books also have some flowery nonsense thats not 100% nessacary.
The thing is, we don't want to know about the person by default. We only need to cook something. It's like searching google maps for the direction and getting told about what that building means to whoever that entered the entry in the Google maps database. Nonsense.
Nah, I also don’t care what story led to you having this recipe. I’d rather the story was a box with a “read more” button. If you can’t get everything you need from the ingredients, it was made poorly. I’ve gone through plenty with the tips and tricks being in parentheses in the instructions. Ingredient lists with an optional section.
the thing is, most recipe websites aren't representative of the bloggers Melissa brought in to interview. most of them have stolen recipes and AI padding slop. when reading a recipe made by an actual human, you'll usually find that the preceding text is no longer than two paragraphs, sometimes down to a sentence, then the insights are within the body text of the instructions. you don't need a 900-word text before each recipe for it to be meaningful and human. that's only done to pad the website for ads.
Lots are white ppl “recreating” that amazing dish they had on vacation. Or putting their “I need to feed 6 kids on a weeknight ‘spin’” on other cultures recipes. Do these people google things from the perspective of an average internet goer? Seems like they have their heads up their 🍑 (and I love netshaq)
Also for copyright. Copyright requires a recipe to have "substantial literary expression" included, so the only way to protect your recipe is to include a bunch of garbage with it.
I've always felt like if a prominent "Skip to recipe" was standard, or the "Backstory" and "Recipe" sections were in collapsible foldouts, there would be far less to worry about. There's merit to the monologue, but sometimes you just want a recipe, and neither is right or wrong
I'm gonna be honest here, the fact that I heard the pitch for Sabrina's website and desperately wanted it to be real shows that food bloggers really do need to rethink how they present their recipes online. I get that they need ads to get paid and want to share their thoughts about the recipe to give some context, but scrolling for 3/4 of the page just to get to a recipe that's 5 ingredients long is excessive. If you have tips about how to prepare certain parts of the recipe, include them in the actual instructions! It's like the argument around online piracy. Yes piracy is wrong but if its easier to access the pirated content than the actual legit sources (and this is not just about paying for stuff), then people are going to use those services. The solution here is to rethink how the information is presented on the website.
A lot of the takes from these chefs / writers don't hold up to scrutiny. I'm an animator by trade, and when I wrote a book about animation, I had to deeply think through what I do and how I do it. That way, I could clearly explain animation to people who were doing it for the first time. My approach to "creating animation" is *not* the same as my approach to "explaining animation to the average person". The goal was not for readers to get professional results on their first (or even 100th) try, but for them to get results, period. If an author is excluding or obfuscating part of a recipe under the pretense of "well, professionals just have an inherent understanding of xyz", then they haven't done their job thoroughly.
As a journalist, brevity and getting to the point are critical. As an IT guy, I hate seeing ads, fluff and poor formatting keeping me from the details I need. I'm all for Sabrina's tool. Nobody says people - or AI - can't create the websites, no matter how unpopular, but I don't want to spend 20 minutes in the supermarket trying to find a list of ingredients. At that point, I'll ignore your recipe and move on to someone else's.
As a software developer, I concur. Good design is extremely crucial and you should always be putting things in the perspective of the end-user. Well-thought out design can allow you to both have your cake and eat it too. As an astronomer- reading fatigue is a real thing and information density is always preferred when it's not for entertainment purposes.
I think recipe writers are being defensive to the reaction that most people don't give a crap about what they write, most people just want the recipe. They seem to believe a blog entry will ADD to people's experience, and maybe it could if that's what people were looking for, but frankly, it isn't. People want to make good food for themselves, not read about the journey to make it, or where it came from. Literally doesn't matter to most people. Certainly doesn't to me. There's a place for all that, but IMO what you're writing isn't a recipe, it's a blog with a recipe in it, and I'm not here for a blog.
Agreed! Imagine reading just about any other instructional manual written the way food blogs are written and trying to follow it ... 🤣 Sure, write about the recipe to sell the concept of it, sell the expectation with a (yes, singular) good photo, but keep the instructions in the instructions and keep them concise.
I think we live in a time when people believe that their life story has some intrinsic value. They’ve been told they’re special, so obviously everyone wants to hear about their dog, their favorite color, and every other mundane detail before they get down to the business of cooking. They forget that we’re not friends hanging out and cooking together. I came looking for a recipe, and the recipe is the only thing of value in this transaction. The rest is just pointless fluff, and I care just as much about the author’s life story as they do about mine.
@@kenrickman6697 now there's an idea. leave comments (if the site has them) with your life story, ending with why that is relevant to how much you enjoyed the recipe. Maybe they'll get the point. :p
I don't usually write comments before I finish the video in case my thought or question gets mentioned and discussed later on, but I can't wait for that. I think Melissa missed the point of what Sabrina is proposing and why she and Taha think it's a good idea. Sabrina is proposing a TOOL that is OPTIONAL TO USE for those that just want to skip straight to the recipe. When I look up recipes, I'm either a) really hungry or b) planning ahead. I don't stop to read the story behind the recipe because it will not help me achieve my goal of finding something I can make later (or immediately in the case of situation "a") and I'm normally not interested in reading that wall of text. I don't think Sabrina and Taha are saying the fluff piece, story, explanation of the food, etc. should be eliminated (Edit: I was partially wrong). I think they just want to create a tool that ppl like me would find extremely useful. If ppl want to read the wall of text that comes before a recipe, then they can totally do that and not use the tool (recipe cleaner website). The tool is there if you want to use it, not to force others into a certain way of thinking. Edit: The compromise to put the background/story after the recipe is a great one. Personally, I think understanding where food came from and hearing how it relates to a person and their culture is cool. But in the narrow context of recipe searching, I do not care. It be different if I was cooking with a friend and they had a story related to the food we were making, for example.
The scroll is how they get their money and such, luckily Answer in progress have their youtube as their main income seemingly and are not online chefs who those ads help get them paid, They definitely landed more on the ethics behind releasing a tool that actively takes away people's income, I'm sure anyone could make it and release a tool similar to this, more just that this group decided they did not want that morality of actively taking away income streams from people who put in effort to make things, especially knowing quite a few. Would be like if they released a tool that skips youtubers ad reads or blocked their refferal links, stuff like that already does exist, but these people morally wouldn't want to be responsible to do that along with their influence, especially knowing what it's like working in that space themselves.
@@rachele183 I'll still load the site, which loads all the ads... then copy and paste the link into the tool and read it there. The ads still got their view.
My biggest problem with recipe sites is that they seem to always make a popup or scroll away for no reason, while I’m cooking. I’ve got cooking hands, don’t make me touch my laptop! It’s not just work ahead of time to find the recipe, it’s additional mental and time load when trying not to incinerate my food. Also, if there’s any tips, PUT IT IN THE ORDERED INSTRUCTIONS! I AM BAD AT REMEMBERING!!! I started to copy recipes into my notes app and add my own customizations, tips, and to taste amounts. It’s helpful for me to be consistently successful.
As someone who 1) hates when my ability to READ the recipe is thwarted by ads/website jumping around and 2) is learning to cook bc he wasn't taught to cook as a child, I have found that I benefit most from following a recipe to the letter, ignoring the context prior to the story. Then after I make it a couple of times, I start to feel comfortable playing around with more/less ingredients. I don't have the knowledge to be able to randomly grab things and randomly measure. I'm like right in the middle of the road here. I'm with Sabrina on the cutting out the "fluff", but with Melissa on the tips and tricks and like a little background to really set the scene (for both of her recipes it looked like she only had a paragraph or so explaining the context and that's fine. Love the compromise of context after the recipe! Love y'all's videos. ☺
I find the same with recipes, but I think this idea might help you if you haven't already thought of it: the ones I like the most, I like to print them out and then I can write my variations on them in pen or pencil. I've got a few recipes where I've altered the level of garlic or tomato soup or some other thing like that, or else if the recipe calls for a clove of garlic, I've written down the equivalent measure of powdered garlic, which keeps much better on my shelf. Also, congrats on teaching yourself to cook. It can be really intimidating, and I know a few people who didn't feel they learned much cooking as a kid and were too scared to try so far as adults. I hope you have much success.
gotta fundamentally disagree with the argument of "if you go to a recipe *blog* you cannot be upset when someone talks about their vacation" I clicked it because it was the top result on a search engine for the recipe I was searching for and all the keyword stuffing on that page pushed a bunch of blogs into my recipe search. that's it that's my nitpick otherwise this really good insight into how that happens
I completely agree. They know they're doing SEO to push their page to the top of results, but the content isn't actually what someone making that search wants to find. You shouldn't get a good page rank if the post is entirely irrelevant.
It's like saying "if you pick up a fiction book, you can't complain that it tells a story instead of facts" when you asked the librarian for books about dinosaur anatomy and they bring back fairy tales about dinosaurs instead of books that talk about dinosaur anatomy. If I could filter out food blogs and just see recipe pages, problem solved. But if I want a recipe for soda bread, I'm practically forced to sift through autobiographies before I can get to the recipe and that's rightfully annoying
@@generalcodsworth4417 Just to continue the analogy, I feel like in this case you blame the librarian no? It’s not the writer’s fault that their fairy tale about dinosaurs with some fun facts about anatomy sprinkled in is what the librarian decided to give. The book is what it is advertised to be, a food blog. Being annoyed that food blogs get pushed by search engines when you actually want plain recipes is understandable, but that is a SEO problem intrinsically
@@Zalda_ The blogs are using SEO optimization to show up in searches for recipes, because they wouldn't make nearly as much money if they were realistically advertised as personal story blogs. So in the analogy, the book publishers are telling the library that they are dinosaur anatomy books. Should the librarian be better at checking? Sure. But the publishers also know exactly what they're doing when taking advantage of the stupidity of the librarian.
This isn't even the biggest problem about online recipes. The BIGGEST problem is all feedback is in the form: This recipe is (good/bad/whatever). Here are the 7 changes I made to it when I tried it.
those people dont want to make art either. it doesnt matter if they see the recipe because they have no want to improve their cooking skills they just want to know what goes into a lasdagne, and that info is easy to find anywhere
So the reason why I would want a recipe cleaner is because during the week, I have little time to myself, I just want to make the food, eat, watch my RUclips videos while I eat, and then do shit that I actually want to do afterwards. If it's the weekend and I have nothing to do, I'll read the blog, If I don't have that much time I'm not reading all that.
there is also buying recipe books that give you the recipe you want on a page, but nooooo you are too lazy to do that, and you want other people's efforts for free
I'm so glad that the "jump to recipe" button is becoming more common. I like having the choice if it's a recipe I've used before or that's straightforward to skip to it. I particularly use it if I'm tossing up between two recipes and want to quickly compare the ingredients so I can't pick the one that suits what I've got in the pantry already. The fluff is helpful for tricky things, but it really gets in the way sometimes.
What I am really seeing is two entirely different use cases. I love the idea of following some person and their story.... but if I know what I want to make and just want to know how to make it.... I want a functional recipe. I want something I can work with. All that cultural stuff gets in the way when I want a functional document.
i feel like this take glosses over the core point of "this is necessary to make this free thing while still compensating the people who's labor created it". NYT Cooking has a ton of recipes that do exactly what everyone complaining in these comments wants, no fluff, straight to instructions, no ads. But it's paid, because that takes work to research, create, and curate a collection of recipes like that. It's honestly kind of insane to expect a premium experience for free, like do people think that someone who works as a food writer doesn't deserve to make a living? If the adds and stories bother you so much, support a writer or a chef and get a subscription to a recipe site or ffs just buy an actual cookbook.
ok but did you even /try/ to check out the "bunch of people who make annoying recipe websites"? if you look at the people she's interviewed, they are all legit bloggers, writers, and chefs. maybe listen to the 6:20 segment, is my kind suggestion. and perhaps 9:50, if you're feeling reflective. dftba.
@@bhangela I'd have way more respect for this video and the people in it if it was a straightforward and honest video about how terrible and obnoxious all the SEO/ad optimization they have to put in there is in order to make money. What they have seems really disingenuous. We all have to do crappy stuff to pay the bills. If they focused more on that instead of all the weak justifications and a poorly thought out "experiment", I think people would have more sympathy.
@@yusufvangieson6157 Because that is a begging the question style argument. Do we have to let these people extract profit from us? Uhh, no, never. We never agreed to that. Yes it takes work to run and fill a website but people do it all of the time on the internet, and they were very popular until the capitalists rushed in and used SEO to bury the free blogs with the trash. We had recipe sharing hobbyists before we had these predators. Damn near every program on my computer was given to me gratis by kind programmers. How can we live in a world where Blender is free but a recipe for mashed potatoes comes with 410,757,864,530 ads?
I know the reality of why the the sites want to keep you there for ads revenue. But the food writers they interviewed I think have a very insular view of the role of food in people lives. For them it`s culture and history and passion and their whole lives. For most people though food is "Lasagna yummy! I´d like to eat a Lasagna and I have an hour to make that happen before I need to return to my life!" Most people aren`t looking for a culinary and cultural food journey in their daily lives.
Also I dont' need your story, author, if I already have my own. Like a few weeks ago I wanted to try my hand making a kind of cake that I used to eat all the time when I was living in east Texas in my early 20s. I went to look up a recipe for it and every single result hand paragraph after paragraph accompanying the recipe that I had to dig through before I could even find out which type of cake it was (since there are two end results for it which are pretty different but have the same name)
yes indeed! While most will probably agree on, that eating itself can be really nice, many if these people won't agree on the act of cooking is. Like, some people may enjoy programming a custom website with handcrafted database access. Others are just happy that certain special websites exists, and use them Or setting up and configuring gameservers, while others just want to play with friends on a server. Or reparing old, broken devices.. the list goes on
If a person has as little time as you say they wouldn’t be looking at a recipe to cook a lasagna from scratch At that point they would just heat up a store bought frozen stouffer’s lasagna that only takes an hour to heat up
I would absolutely love to see someone butcher a whole chicken for the first time with only the instructions found in a recipe that was written for SEO, like almost every recipe online is.
For food preparation like that I would say a recipe is not useful. Even the extra fluff isn't going to get you the details needed for how to prepare things properly. But once you learn how to quarter a chicken, dice an onion, mince some garlic then the recipes that call for 1 diced onion and a whole quartered chicken make a lot more sense. Like if I need to learn how to julienne a carrot properly, I'm not going to the recipe fluff, I'm finding a youtube video to watch the technique.
The thing is, if you're a first timer in butchering a chicken. Regardless of the layout and content of the recipe, you're not gonna do it perfectly. It is a skill you gained through time
I'm gonna greatly offend a lot of people now, but cooking doesn't need to be that precise. You will not ruin your meal by using a large potato instead of a medium. You will not make it uneadible by leaving out one spice. You don't need the life story to make a meal. You need guidance and inspiration - and when you're new in the kitchen, direction. Tips and tricks should not be sprinkled into the story, but have their own place - furthermore, they are tips and tricks, to make things easier, quicker, better. Not mandatory to read or incorporate. Baking is another story because that is like chemistry.
As someone who just started to learn how to cook in the last year, I can confirm, that the tips and photos buried in all the other stuff up top CAN be helpful. That said, when the post is so long, the pictures are so numerous, the tips & tricks section is there, the recommended other recipes are there, AND there's ads spliced throughout, a lot of the blogs become nearly unusable. I have an ad blocker and even still I have to simply give up on the site. I agree bloggers need to make money, there just needs to be a better way. Because you aren't going to make money if I simply cannot use the site.
The main issue is just better structure, i don't like sitting in the grocery parking lot, on my way home from work, scrolling for what i need to buy when it could just be a simple easy found list of at least the minimum things i will need with optional ingredients labeled appropriately. You were taught how to write reports in school for a reason, they are easy to understand 1. Intro/history, but try to keep it a reasonable length 2. 2 lists, ingredients, and tools. Doesn't even need to be precise (tsp, etc.). You don't buy cumin by the pinch. I just need to know that I need it 3. Prep, properly titled for easy visibility, through in a story about cutting vegetables with your grandma if you want, but then have a distinct subtitle and section for the actual instructions, this can include tips and tricks. 4. Do the same as 3 for cooking and presentation 5. Conclusion/final thoughts
If you cannot cook the food with JUST the recipe, the recipe is bad and should be ignored or rewritten to get rid of all the extraneous trash. "Stewing size" or "a pinch", for example, are hallmarks of a shitty recipe. They are meaningless. They need to be rewritten to "one inch chunks" and "1/16th of a teaspoon" That's all there is to it. All these food bloggers' excuses are worthless. I say this as someone who actually write recipes.
All the people trying to get others to cook: "It's super easy, just follow a recipe, anyone can do it!" This video: "It's super elitist actually, you'll only ever ACTUALLY know how to cook through YEARS of experience and dedication, you can't cook unless you know that my grandmother in Cambodia used 3 fist fulls of canolli in her super special wonder dish, and you won't know what a fist full is unless you read my blog!" (I make this as a joke, this video actually makes some good points and I do think the compromise at the end would be a good one, but I just found the dichotomy amusing)
Dude, I feel the same, even if it was a joke. I firmly think cooking is a huge part of life and making good tasting meals is important. I despise elitism in general, but definitely in something so ubiquitous as food. Last thing I want to feel is someone telling me that I need soul in my cooking or need to understand cultural relevance or how I couldn't possibly appreciate it, but here it is I guess a plebian can try it. That's not fun. That makes me actively not want to use their recipe.
If I'm a parent, who is hungry, with two children who are also hungry and it's 5:30 pm I'm not going to carefully parse through paragraphs of a diary entry and what feels like an infinite amount of ads that all seem to be videos to cook a recipe. I'm tired and hungry and need to feed folks before 7pm. Give. Me. The. Recipe. This. Is. Annoying.
I feel like if it's 5:30 PM and you and your kids are all hungry, you'd just go with a dish you already know how to cook, no? Recipe blogs are for people who have time to prep and buy the listed ingredients.
My ideal recipe blog post has a few quick facts at the top: number of portions, prep/cook time, how well it reheats. Then one paragraph about the dish, a link to further information (e.g. the long post with the backstory, or a video, or a relevant book or restaurant) then the utensils (very important and not something that even most cookbooks do) and ingredients lists, including substitution ideas, then the steps, then a list of notes about potential mistakes. So.... I'm arguing for the middle ground.
And the best part of my ideal is that the blog author can link to a longer blog post about the dish that links back to the recipe and that boosts their placement in the search algorithms
The problem with most food blogs is the writer wants you to value what they value, and you don't have the time or energy to care. You just want that recipe. This creates, at best, a mediocre experience for the user. at worst, it's infuriating. As a UX designer (as well as a cook and writer) here's how I'd fix the problem. Keep the beautiful photos, those add lots of value. Put the recipe right at the top, with a section for tips and tricks directly below or beside it (make sure the header is large enough to be noticable. Then place the family story below that, in a small column on the side, or under a dropdown box. It's there but not in the way. Place ads anywhere they won't be in the way, like at the bottom or sides, not in between or on top of important information. Avoid annoying pop up ads that you have to click out of like the plague. Test the site with multiple users, see what they do and how they feel about it, and make adjustments accordingly. At this point people will probably want to spend much more time on your site than they did before because you showed them you understand what they actually want from the site and didn't make it difficult
I’m not a chef by trade, I don’t have that intuitive understanding of ratios and potency. I know I’m not gonna make chef level cooking but I do expect my recipes to tell me how to cook the recipe in a way where I don’t need to be professional to understand. You don’t have to teach me the basics, I can learn those on my own, but measurements help me to understand what I need to do. If vital info isn’t in the ingredients list or the recipe instructions then that’s a badly written recipe.
I barely started the video but that’s what I absolutely hate about english internet recipes. You have to scroll through all that text to finally get to even see the ingredients. You can also click a barely visible button to jump to the recipe but it’s always so annoying. I’m from Poland and if polish internet recipes even have an introduction it’s very brief. You literally just scroll once and you’re there. Hopefully the video at least explains why it happens
You also don't really want to be clicking buttons because it could be an ad, I think I've basically trained myself not to see ads, which might explain why I've never seen one of those buttons 😅
My reason for not enjoying the "tips and tricks" is that I approach recipes much like I do home cooking - at 14:00 Frankie and Joanne mention grabbing things, and throwing things into a wok -- that's how a lot of people use recipes as well - grab 4-5-6 different recipes for the same thing, pick out the parts they like better and make something different. Having the tips and tricks in that case feels like a disorganized home kitchen - you need to go through a ton of pots and pans to get to the spices you want to throw in the wok.
Respectfully, the only people you found who would agree that there is value in the story attached to each recipe are the people who have vested interests in that value existing. The recipes themselves do have value, as evidenced by websites and creators existing who publish recipes behind paid services but then keep the format simplistic without the bloat necessary to slip infinite intrusive, site-breaking ads into the page.
The real issue is that there isn't a consistent standard of writing for the majority of recipes on the internet. As someone who does a significant amount of recipe writing for a professional kitchen. I can tell you the majority of people leave out easily defined parameters in ingredient listings, and recipe instructions. Also a lot of recipes are to ubiquitous in size/measurement terminology. Good recipes have a weight measurement for every ingredient, trim loss, cook loss, total yield weight of ingredients before and after cooking, and a suggested portion size (in weight) with nutritional information for that portion. Then clearly defined instructions for the prep of each ingredient and the steps (with "tips and tricks" written into the applicable step) That way I don't need to dig through a large blog post to find a critical step not even written in the instructions. This would make cooking an internet recipe a lot more consistent. I don't mind a food blog. and I enjoy reading a story. But there is nothing stopping someone from A. putting the recipe at the top of the page, and B. adding all important information to the recipe first and then to the blog later as well. Sorry for ranting lol.
I fully agree with the points in this video! Especially the food it looks delicious lol. However, I will say that to me the issue isn’t the fact that the ads are there, but rather that the ads can sometimes be so intrusive that the website breaks, which makes me not want to read the blurb or try out the recipe.
@ oh i use ad-blockers galore. But ultimately the primary place I look for recipes is on my phone, which I’m assuming is how most people are also looking for recipes. If you know a great mobile ad-blocker that doesn’t also want an insane subscription fee, please share.
Because people use adblockers (looking at you ^^) and webpage ads pay so little, it's the only way I make it sustainable and free. If they weren't as annoying, they wouldn't pay as much, and the website wouldn't be up at all
Brave browser is built around an ad blocker, and Kiwi supports desktop browser extensions. Brave I hesitate to recommend these days because you have to turn off half a dozen things they've added to try monetizing the project, but once those items are turned off it's a great experience.
This is a masterclass of fallacies. It's cute how you tried to use arguments to justify the real reason why recipes are long: SEO. If your customers are majorly telling you that the reading is unnecessary, guess what - it is unnecessary
Your point is the extra stuff helps you make the recipe. That info should be in the actual recipe section because it’s cooking instructions. It’s dumb that it’s not.
Summary: It's because of ad revenue and because the writer is making the web page for themself instead of for the reader. Additional Tips & Tricks can either be hidden in a collapsable section or beneath the recipe. The novel portion is unnecessary. This video says anywhere from 1 sentence to 2 paragraphs. That is an understatement. I've seen it go on for pages and pages before the actual recipe is shown. What is helpful: Photos of the finished product User reviews from people who tried following the recipe, plus their own photos.
My rule is that if I open a page and can see the beginning of the recipe below the chatter, I'll read it. 'Cause the fact it's not running off the page tells me it's a reasonable length. A few paragraphs _formatted_ ? I'll read. A block of text with no formatting for readability and the scroll bar is 16th of an inch tall...? I'm clicking 'Back' and going elsewhere. 99% of that page is about to be blather.
we need such cleaner for every damn page now! Cookies, pop-ups, subscribe, discount, automatically video playing, advertisement, audio-noise… I'm going crazy, I just need my information, just answer on my question! I really think it's a huge problem now with everything online. Note * placing ads for being paid at the recipe page or RUclips channel - I understand, I agree. Photos for each cooking step is extremely useful; if in instruction written “prepare a chicken” and then next step “fry it in the pan”, it's actually not a tip how prepare a chicken, but a part of the instruction. But when on pages everything jumping at you or starts telling “full history of the potato” before giving a recipe, I see it as an issue.
My usual gripe with annoying recipe websites stems down to the usability of the website goes down the drain super hard when I can barely touch the screen to scroll because new adds keeps popping up in places, moving text around or jumping to different places on the page. I love to learn where food comes from, and I do research that regulary without even looking at specific recipes, but if I am looking up recipes and many of them are actively wasting my time in almost predatory adds and making their sites really hard to use - then I stop caring for their story and how they got their recipe. If I don't find your recipe page easy to read, comfortable to use, then I will just close it down almost immediatly
i totally agree with what jon kung said. i dont cook professionally, but i cook almost all the meals i eat for about 25 years now, and i also never measure anything. its all about vibes. but when im trying out something new and just need a bit of reassurance, i often do a quick web search on what ingredient combinations other people use for a specific dish. i know that the flavor text is kinda important in general, but personally, i only briefly look at the ingredients list, not even at the measured amounts, and im good. so for me personally, a recipe cleaner would save a bit of time. but i also know i am probably not part of the main audience of these recipe sites ^^ the last new thing i created was a pasta sauce that consists 40% of fried apple stripes and it is just mindblowing. i thought about publishing the recipes i came up with over time online, but the translation into a list of measured amounts of ingredients is killing the vibes so hard for me that i just cant do it... maybe i should start a cooking youtube channel instead :D
Be sure to check out the talented food writers and video producers we interviewed for this video - their links are in the description!
But the real questions is: did Melissa convince you to stop finding online recipes so annoying? Let us know :)
I think I'm already subbed to TheKoreanVegan.
I've read all the backgrounds first on Third Culture Kitchen. Recipe layout is superior. Will wait until autumn to make the recipes, pretty warm here at 40.35°S at the moment.
She absolutely didn't, because it is annoying for anyone that is prioritizing trying to find ideas for things they can make, which is the majority of people. Yeah, writing is hard. Making good recipes is hard. Yes, you deserve recognition for doing either, but expecting the same people that just want to find a good recipe to care in that moment about the full experience of coming up with the recipe is...not realistic. If you had to listen to the life story of every construction worker that worked on the road you want to drive on, you'd wear ear plugs. Same goes here.
She definitely didn't. However, this video did succeed in alerting me to the existence of my new favorite thing: recipe cleaners. Thank you for that!
Check out Luke Smith's based cooking. He was tired of this very same issue, so recipes are only ingredients and directions. The picture has to be a real picture of the thing you made, and that's it, no trackers, no ads, etc. His video was posted 3 years ago.
"The recipe goes first, and the life story stuff goes after that" is exactly the solution I personally want. I would like to NOT have to constantly scroll down when my browser decides to reload the page mid meal prep.
Why does your browser keep doing that?
I mean, that's usually how it's set up in cookbooks or the stories are in their own separate section.
Oh, and don't forget when you're halfway scrolled through a long af paragraph, and the ads finally catch up and suddenly you're looking at an F150 and your paragraph is now one of ten super long paragraphs so you don't even know where you were, until, oh, hey, now it's a damned Chevy that popped up because I guess that other ad wasn't the only one still loading. But you can't even just sit and wait a minute for all of them to load because they'd rather wait and then pop up on you when you get to them.
I like the cultural backstory and personal backstory and I love the tips and tricks. I just don't want it to be a meter of scrolling only to then see that I don't have the ingredients I need and I have to find a different recipe. also if there's an ad between the ingredients list and the instructions I'm much much less likely to use that site again, I need those to be next to each other
@@morganlegayfay Well you pay for cookbooks, on those websitesyou pay by having to scroll by adds
The actual issue Sabrina's Website fixed was never actually addressed in the video. It is definitely important have the extra information of technique and culture, and I want the hard working chefs to get paid. But in an effort to monetize on the Chef's hard work, they create a genuinely BAD user experience. There has to be a better way than blasting you with so many adds you can't even scroll the screen down on your phone.
i agree-- despite the fact tht the direction that they took was entertaining (15:16 -ish onwards), i wish they explored this nuance more about how to chefs/food-bloggers should be able to share their recipes without resorting to blasting you with adverts and popups. but yknow. we live in a society and all that, lmao
it used to be fine because you could put one or two ads on a page and they didnt have to be video ads. but these days mysteriously every content creator and influencer has been getting less hits for commissions on companies websites. it couldn't be at all because of chrome extensions that swipe those commissions by offering coupon codes or anything like that.
YES. THIS!
There is a better way. Thera are a few bloggers/chef that have figured that out. It's called creating two pages. One for the culture and what not. And the other for the recipe and any techniques that are important for the recipe/
@@bhangela I mean you can just buy cookbooks? I feel like getting them money isn't hard, the problem is getting them money without paying or inconveniencing yourself at all, and tbh that just seems like an untenable goal
Best order for a recipe site:
1 - ingredients and equipment you'll need
2 - basic instructions
3 - step by step instructions with things to watch out for (you could get fancy and have these expand out from the basic instruction on click/tap)
4 - "Thank you for trying my dish, now here is a the story of this dish to read while you eat it:" (all the long winded stuff that doesn't actually have to do with cooking the thing).
Perfection! All of it matters, but not all of it matters to the cooking portion. The flow of the page should match the desired flow of the experience. This layout would create a page I would not only visit, but return to, and actually make the recipes from.
This is the best order, and if anyone ACTUALLY cares about the origins of the recipe, they WILL read it. At the same time, you don't alienate the readers who don't care and just want to make a meal.
Thank you.
I would add alternative edition for example if you don't have certain equipment the best option to use as it is the has the most probability of the majority of people having access. With what using that equipment will change in the recipe. Ingredients swaps and if any changes needed to be done if use. For example some ingredients can be easily swapped without much changes in the final product, you can add changes if making for specific dietary restrictions for example gluten-free, dairy free, if they are allergic to certain foods if a suitable substitute can be found including it. You don't have to write about every substitute variations in food ingredients replacement or every equipment versions. Just the best ones to use if you are switching something in the recipe. Then offer both measurements used in cooking, You could even put tips and tricks in making the recipe. You can even do so much like listing a simple identification on where you got your ingredients and equipment.
The issue, to my mind, is that the recipe blogger who is offended if people skip the intro has assumed a social contract to which most of the recipe-seekers did not (and are not interested in) agreeing. Most readers likely aren't regular blog readers who are interested in story/connection anymore. No one is entitled to a successful business, particularly if its fundamental model is giving away the product for free. It's disingenuous to suggest that the super long scroll-down is anything but for ads and SEO. Multiple paragraph stories don't make a recipe easier to comprehend or cook successfully. They're just filler that is designed to make the blog money. Most printed cookbooks have a recipe blurb that's 2-3 sentences at most and the actual ingredients/instructions appear on the same page. If a recipe is well-written and well-tested, it doesn't need more than that.
The difference is with a printed cookbook the "contract" is buying the book.
yeah I hate how this video is pretending like there's any actual useful information in the pre amble. It's just there so they can show you more ads, and that's all it's ever been for. Also in this day and age, you can find recipes for anything for free. Acting like someone uploading a new recipe means they deserve to be paid is kinda ridiculous...
@colecube8251 Creating recipes involves time and resources to test and refine them. Why shouldn't they be reimbursed for that?
@@connor1586 because we're in the era of the internet where thousands of people have already uploaded every possible variation of the recipe you could think of. Do you expect to be paid when you upload a tutorial to your RUclips channel that's already been made thousands of times? I think they should be reimbursed, but I don't think that it's something reasonable to expect nowadays
@connor1586 The issue is not that they want to be reimbursed for their efforts, but that they're suggesting the SEO/ad space is a vital part of the recipe. It's not; it's their business model to make the blog worth their time. The whole point of the comparison to a printed cookbook is that with a different model to make money, it's clear that the blah-blah pre-amble is unnecessary for recipe success.
13:42 This is such a bad take - if there are "tips and tricks" outside of regular cooking skills that the person needs to know to make your recipe, and you don't include it in the recipe but rather the conversational blog entry that accompanies it, that's a failure to write a proper recipe. If the person reading it needs to know how to butterfly a turkey for a recipe, you include that. These takes are from people who are cooks first and writers second, and it shows.
I also am not super convinced that all of these tips and tricks are included in the story part of the recipe.
For example, 13:54 "Do you know what the test is [for being properly cooked]? They just have to slide off the fork." This could (should?) be included in the recipe part, and doesn't make sense in the the story part ... unless the story says something like "My nana always made this dish, and we knew the potatoes were fully cooked when they just slid off the fork" which honestly seems weird and sounds more like AI wrote it. (I'm not sure if that's potatoes or not, so I'm just using that as a placeholder.)
There does have to be an assumption of knowledge when you write a recipe. If I have to include how to cut an onion for every time I say "one onion, diced" the recipe would still go on forever. See also things like how to cut potatoes if your hands hurt, where you can stop in the process if your kid/dog starts freaking out, what to use if you thought you had beef broth but it's actually shrimp broth.
@ I agree that there has to be an assumption of general knowledge. Doesn't this weaken the claim that "helpful tips" might be included in the story bit, then?
If it's important enough to include in the story part, shouldn't it be important enough to include in the recipe? (And if it's assumed to be sufficiently common knowledge, then why does it need to be included in the story at all?)
I guess I'm just unclear where the middle ground of "cooking information that isn't important enough to put into the instructions, but is important enough that it belongs in the story part" is.
I could see it for substituting cookware (i.e. don't have a pot the exact right size), or maybe something like "baking the meat vs cooking in a pan will achieve roughly the same results" but even the latter of those seems like it could just be in the instructions.
I kinda disagree but not entirely. Thing is, I cook a fair bit and usually when I have a recipe, there are two stages of me working with it. Stage 1: Read the entire thing top to bottom and understand all the steps I am not familiar with yet (like butterflying a turkey, laminating dough, emulsify whatever in whatever else etc.). Stage 2: I'm actually cooking and I didn't learn the recipe by heart. I need some quick reminders what step is coming next.
I think I'm not the only person working that way (?) but obviously I don't have data on this. However, there are two ways to cater to this: Either with heavy use of bold text that sets off the jist of a section or by providing one long-form recipe with all the details and tips and then another version that only lists the ingredients and then provides summarised steps as bullet points.
Many online recipes do this already. My only grief with them is that they put the shortlist of steps right down at the very bottom. That way if the website reloads, if I want to cook the dish a third or fifth time, if I reopen it on another device, I have to scroll past everything every single time. Also, if I first just want to check the ingredients list to see if I have everything, same thing - scroll all the way down.
I feel like all the parts of online recipes have value. Yes, even the travel blog and family biography sections. But I hate the order that they come in. It feels like someone wants me to earn their recipe by first reading through everything else.
I understand the value in the story. At the same time, I cannot absorb everyone’s story for every meal! Having the option to read AFTER the recipe would be amazing. Having the recipe to start would make me revisit the site more, so I’m not jumbling through tech issues with my phone blowing up as i scroll to find what I would need to make it
I agree 100%. I don’t mind a little context and history behind the recipe, but anything more than a paragraph is just over the top.
Then you add the 50+ website breaking ads and pop up banners and you get the people visiting your website annoyed as hell when they just want the damn recipe with maybe a smidge of context
Or during! If the recipe has me watching the pot for 15 minutes to be there when something happens or lightly stirring, that's the perfect point to give me something to ready that is related the recipe. I am, however, not going to scroll back up and lose my place to ready that info.
@@ArtofcarissaThe ads are the true purpose of this structure. By pushing the recipe down the page you have to scroll through more ads, generating more income. Also SEO but that could probably work if the recipe was first.
Having a recipe cleaner doesn’t stop people who want to read those parts of the recipe from reading them. It does give those that of us that just want to get to the recipe the opportunity to avoid having to sift through a lot of stuff that we don’t want to look at to get to what we’re looking for. Not to mention the web design of a lot of these recipes is just horrible. Weird boxes all over the place ads stuffed in here and there, it’s visually torturous and just not conducive to enjoying anything.
There's always the Jump to Recipe button!
I love how this whole thing was essentially a Sabrina video and a Melissa video butting heads and having to battle it out
It's that one image where two kids are fighting and another one is eating popcorn.
@@Multibe150 the one eating popcorn is Taha (?)
They even changed the thumbnail from Meslissa to Sabrina haha
hilarious tbh
Right! Made a very good video, with good lessons along the way
A lot of them have skip to the recipe buttons now which is very nice but makes you wonder why its not at the top to begin with
So they can serve you the ads
Ads! Same reason google started to suck more and more at finding stuff! The sites make money through ads and the metric by which others are willing to pay for ads is how long people stay on your site and scroll through.
So these google result pages are literally designed to be cumbersome and confusing so you stay and scroll longer. it`s not a bug it`s an intentional design feature 🤷♂
The button doesn't work half the time for me 😂 I'm grateful for the ones that do though
Because the other stuff generates the revenue to pay for the recipe you get for free. If you didn't scroll past them, the recipe makers wouldn't get ad revenue and so you wouldn't get your recipe
Why would people want to make money from a thing that costs money to make? Yeah I’m stumped, it’s a mystery
The recipe writers basically said they’re bad at writing recipe instructions.
As someone learning to cook in middle-age, the tips and tricks would be great, but that’s almost never what the paragraphs are.
As someone who writes medical quick reference material (where mistakes could lead to patient death), your steps should explain everything required, in as few words as possible. If context, or situational variables, or details for beginners are needed, put them *alongside* the step in a visually distinct way (and also keep them short and direct).
Exactly
@@azzaelulbrinterYou must have a technical writer background 👏👏👏
That was the impression I got as well
Some people just don't know how to be succinct, period. They always use way too many words to get their point across.
Plus, there's another thing too - there's this implication that if you don't know something, your first instinct is to look at the blurbs. But almost no one is doing that! If a receipt told me to cut a whole chicken for example, I'm gonna Google a video for it, I'm not gonna scroll through 8 pages to find what may not even be there.
There's also the stupid stuff like the spices not being labeled. Seriously? At that point you're just FORCING the situation to prove your own point
"If you don't wanna pay for the recipe that's what you have to deal with" go to hell. The idea that paywalled information should ever exist in a world with the internet, or that someone should only have access to actual garbage information for free is absurd.
The problem isn't the tips and tricks and photos and story. The problem is the tips and tricks are spliced between ads far from the relevant step of the recipe and sprinkled between bits of backstory and just a few more ads. Give me the recipe. Give me the tips when relevant. Let me cook it. Then, if I enjoy it, maybe I'll actually check out why you made it. It's not complicated, but it's also a lot harder to force you to scroll passed all of their ads
Adblock is your friend.
yeah, the problem is the websites are eye bleeding garbage. So happy for ai answers for when you forget how long to boil an egg, etc and youtube for actual cooking instructions. Written recipes can definitely go extinct imho
@@Serai3 so instead of scrolling past a lot of ads, i'll scroll past 50 blank spots. and also docking some random blogger's revenue over it.
@@durdleduc8520 actually a good blocker just makes ads disappear. No blank spots, it's more like they never existed
@@Serai3 Brave Browser works, too. Better, I'd argue. Adblock used to glitch out the page for me or cause the thing not to load without disabling it. Use it for most online websites nowadays just because it makes me forget about the adpocalypse sprawling out everywhere.
I just tried to look up a recipe on a website without an ad blocker and my browser almost crashed. I don't have a problem with putting ads on sites, I get making money is needed, but when there is one every paragraph, that's excessive.
Yeah if they’re adding so many ads that your website browser crashes and can’t handle it, they’re taking it waaaay overboard
Unfortunately, website ad revenue is garbage these days, so the amount they're putting is probably the minimum feasible amount.
@ which is why a patreon or direct donate link would probably be more feasible and yield more $$$
Plus it would take up less screen space
The autoplaying videos, popups, and floating banners...I bounce out of that page immediately. Ain't worth it lol. But yeah, 99.9% of the time I have an adblocker on.
@@Artofcarissa I also have this intuition, but it's so obvious of an idea that it must not actually work out, or people would already have made that switch.
To be honest, even as a proponent of the idea I wouldn't actually sub to a recipe patreon. Would you?
They’ll tell you their entire life story and how this recipe was passed down 69.2 generations before they say you need 7 eggs
😂😂
I'll give a shit about your story after I've tasted the food and actually care.
There is a Korean place near my house that I would *happily* spend hours interviewing the head chef if I could get their recipes.
I don't give two shits about the recipe from the tea shop down the street over their 'family style, home made, traditional muffin.' Those muffins suck and I just don't care.
Keep the tips and tricks. Throw out the narrative about Nana.
I'm a massive cookery book fan, but online recipes are incredibly irritating.
The food writer suggesting that the only alternative is just writing 4 ingredients Is insane and completely makes me disregard his opinion.
A little blurb is fine. But I haven't seen a little blurb on any recipes I've searched for recently.
@@_kowono Same. I would rather pay $10 for a book rather than looking for recipes online. The blurb should be a few sentences that describe the dish. Not the writers life. I dont care at all about how this dish came to be. Thats for after ive tasted it. Tell me how long the dish takes and what i need. Those are the two most important things when looking for a recipe and shouldnt be after scrolling down a mile. These bloggers are out of touch with whats actually important.
Assuming a generational time of 20 years that recipe would be from the early Middle Ages!
Having "tips and tricks" be necessary seems like an admission that you can't write recipes properly
Yup, usually when I have to fish for the tips it's because the instructions are really bare bones.
Nah, a lot of that is information that some people absolutely need, but is useless filler for everyone else. It makes sense to seperate that stuff out.
it's not though. some people will know that if the flour is too dry they need to add water and others will need to be told that. not everyone is at the same level and to write all the tips and tricks into the recipe itself would make everyone unhappy because the whole point of the recipe is to sumarize the instructions into basic steps for someone who already knows flour thats too dry needs water
Dafaq? no? Tips and Tricks exist to aid instructions, in ANYTHING. That's what they're FOR. -sincerely Uel
5:50 I don't think I could disagree with this guy more in this statement. Many older cookbooks on my shelf are exactly that.
Internet Shaquille very quickly became an elitist once he got the tiniest audience and has been insufferable ever since.
came here to say exactly this
I think you misunderstood him he generally was implying that the information included beside the recipe adds the reason why you would use this particular recipe instead of other recipes for the same meal. It provides it's characteristics that mark it different than all those other similar recipes.
I would like to point out two things:
- I would absolutely trust a recipe that is just ingredients and instructions, without anything else, no styling, no link to the overarching website, nothing. That is how I prefer my internet.
- If you speak German, public broadcasters have expansive recipe libraries on the internet. Example: NDR Ratgeber Kochen. We already pay for that, so the whole "We need to make money from this" does not apply. I feel like more of culture should be like that. The revenue should be independent from the performance of individual works.
Similarly if you speak English, BBC Good Food has a ton of recipes with no blog or ads (at least within the UK - I know the BBC tends to add ads when accessing outside of the UK)
I was also confused by the idea that writing a bunch of stuff to scroll past builds credibility. Decent web design can, I guess, but a reasonably-professional looking website with just the recipe would seem incredibly legit to me, and they do exist. And even an unprofessional-looking website or a reddit post with just the recipe seems like it has potential, and if there are comments with people's positive experiences with the recipe, that would be what would build its credibility to me.
I concur. Especially if it's something simple. If I'm forgetful and can't remember how long to soft boil an egg, I don't need any additoinal information than time for each size. If I want to make a basic Tiramisu, all I need is ingredients and steps. If I want the best Tiramisu in the world, I will need additional tips, like which way to dip the ladyfingers in the coffee, maybe what coffee is the best of it, and so on, and maybe if I'm trying to make the best Tiramisu, I'm so much into it that I'm also interested in reading about its history and how the author came up with this specific way of making it, I'll happily read it. But if I'm making the simple version, that probably means I want something easy, fast and perhaps I'm not that interested in diving deep into the lore of it, and certainly not at the very moment when I'm trying to read the instructions to know if I have all the ingredients and kitchen equipment
Not only culture. Imagine a world in which the provision of housing is a communal task and not something you can make a profit from. Or the provision of an internet connection.
I wonder how much is cultural. I'm Polish in Australia, Polish are to the point, Australians beat around the bush until the leaves fall off and get mad that you didn't guess the point that they never specifcally said.
It's ... confusing. But my guess is that they prefer the rambly recipe, and will trust it more.
I will not.
Why is your recipe so bad that you need to CONVINCE me first? No. Just give me the recipe.
BTW, the site Sabrina was making already exists and is called Just the Recipe, they also made it into an app
I use Paprika app. Does the same thing. It's really saves a lot of time.
Cool, but Sabrina's website also has the background at the bottom thing and judging by the name of the other app/website, I don't think they have that
@thatonedude66 Sabrina is not the person who was writing the food website, she's the one who started the vid saying to get rid of the recipe stories
too many startups
based thanks
I don't know man, I transcribed most of my family recipes for my own use and included just ingredients and very light instructions. For all the baking stuff I legit just have ingredient proportions, oven temp and baking time, no other instructions because that's all I need since I've made these recipes tons of times.
It shouldn't be the job of every individually written recipe to teach you all of the fundamentals of cooking like how to dice an onion or carve a chicken. We also live in the realm of the interent where you can legit just write "carve chicken" and hyperlink to a tutorial that covers that for those who don't know how but isn't intrusive to those who do.
Lastly, most of the struggles Sabrina was having with Melissa's recipe wasn't because of the missing historical context, but it was because the ingredients weren't labled and the measurments weren't standard (instead of pinch of salt, either say salt to taste or 1 tsp, instead of stewing chunk write 1 in chunks). If the individual "tips and tricks" part are essential for the result (like blooming the spices or soaking the rice), they should be included in the instructions. That's the whole point of the instructions.
I think most of the commenteres here agree that we don't want these recipe writers to not get paid, and we don't want to lose the cultural significance of these recipes, but we should definitely have the ingredients, measurements and core instructions at the top.
Yeah if you know how to cook, you can pretty much look at the ingredients and figure it out
And yet, when I Google how to “fold in the cheese”, I get a very unhelpful Canadian television show.
Fold in the cheese..in what???
yesyeswonderfulWHEREISTHERECIPECLEANER
Yeah, this “experiment” is flawed from the start, since the tips and tricks section solves a problem that it itself created to justify its own existence. It also asumes that the people cooking the recipe will be too lazy to open an extra tab, but not lazy enough to cook a dish by themselves.
Moreover, even if the experiment had completely and undoubtedly justified the existence of tips and tricks, it still doesn’t justify the existence of the story part of the recipe, the part people complain about the most, since it doesn’t add any physical value to the food and, coupled with ads, makes the page ungodly to navigate, especially on smartphones, which are the main tool people use to look up recipes in the modern age
Also has anyone noticed how the cooking challenge was weighted against Sabrina? Melissa handed her unlabeled spices and had he cook with boned chicken that wasn’t pre- butchered. And then Melissa stepped in to help. If you wanted to prove how important those stories were you should have handed her the recipes ‘story’ and see if she could have found those tips and tricks!
I know right? My spices are in bottles that say what they are on them lol
Yup, totally.
im 99% sure the story about the grandma didn't include how to debone chicken, or identify unlabelled spices.
Yeah, since she talked so much about being new to writing recipes, I was curious how well written Melissa’s recipe actually was BEFORE the website scraped the information
Also, if you need to change the recipe as you cook it, it's not a good recipe.
I noticed Melissa's blog features a custom font called Melissa Serif (which I can only assume is her handwriting) and I just wanted to say I really appreciate the personal touch and I think it's kind of connected to her whole point.
This glossed over ad sales. That's the reason I'm scrolling past 1000 words on their genealogy or world travels. Also the reason "jump to the recipe" literally scrolls down the page past the ads.
Recipe writers and bloggers need to get paid but also the current status quo is extreme.
I don't know why everyone buys into the argument that everything people do on the internet needs to be paid. No it doesn't. People do their hobbies for free all of the time, in fact it is common for people to paid to show off their hobbies. That is why thy ad-hawking recipe writers do all that SEO. They need to use internet aggression to hide the free stuff. Recipe sharing on the internet pre-dates the internet advertisement.
@@Millionsofpeas These are people who do it as a job, not the hobbyists. You won't find a hobbyist on your first few pages of the search engine unless you're searching for something very bespoke
14:50 It feels disingenuous to claim that the life story will improve how you cook the food. That simply isn't the case, if there is something in the story that actually impacts how you prepare the meal it's an INSTRUCTION and should be found... in the instructions. It's fine for instructions to include things other than "put flour in the bowl" or "stir it" - they can be more complicated like "add flour until the dough isn't sticky anymore." I don't need to know about that one time as a kid when your mom made this and the dough was sticking to your hands and she told you that is because there isn't enough flour in it yet. Just explain the relevant part, leave out the story. Nobody is saying that a recipe shouldn't include information about how to perform the steps or why it's done. But it shouldn't include information that doesn't help you make the food.
6:20
@@bhangela Lord_zeel never said that they were against people putting their stories in, but that hiding instruction in background details and pretending it is what makes the recipe better is disingenuous.
@@Pumpky_the_kobold "Just explain the relevant part, leave out the story. Nobody is saying that a recipe shouldn't include information about how to perform the steps or why it's done. But it shouldn't include information that doesn't help you make the food."
For most of the comment you're right but at the end they make it pretty clear they don't want the story at all.
@@bhangela "You are trying to attract people to your site to make ad revenue, you cannot be upset that people want the stuff they were looking for instead of your holiday stories."
10:30 onwards feels like the weirdest red herring that don't address the complaint of many people actually just wanting the actual recipie because that's all they need.
Saying effectively "Some tips buried in the SEO slop will help people who don't know how to cook" is....baffling.
Nobody wants important info left out of a recipe. The problem is that important info, including the recipe itself is berried in a massive page. You showed one of them. It was unreadable.
This is the first video i felt iffy on. We're not saying don't include a bit of your past, but it isn't IMPORTANT to how to MAKE the recipe. The tips and tricks? IMPORTANT. i don't understand how the original point sabrina had got so lost in translation. Sabrina also never advocated for vague recipes. No one does!
Sometimes those tips are like, "If your onions are browning a little too fast, you may want to add extra oil." How fast is too fast? How much extra oil? How do you even know this tip is for you? This would be a bad inclusion in the formal recipe because of those questions. I've seen pages with "tips and tricks" sections at the bottom where that could go, but you can't really include too many of them in a section like that, so it's not necessarily good to do those either, but they can help. I can also see the background info including variations could be really helpful too. These aren't necessarily all going to fit in the printable recipe, and they're not going to be valuable to every cook, but for some, they are.
Also, Melissa is talking about tips and tricks here, but I also think if someone is in the mood for a whole experience, they may like to imagine this family eating this meal in some other place, at some other time. That does have value for some people. (Also, if you particularly hate an ingredient, like I do with one, you can sometimes tell from the writing that this person really likes that thing, and you can know to avoid their recipes.)
@@janewaysmom +
They often have notes on certain ingredients that can be hard to find or are unusual and notes on certain techniques. Like the timing of when you should add things or what you are looking for.
@@DarlingsOrgans Right!? Why does this video make me feel so unconfortable. I feel like I'm being gaslit into liking baddly written recipe.
Imagine you're building a clock from stock materials and the build guide was formatted like a typical cooking blog page. That would be insanity.
"you want to take away their ads". Yes, yes i do. It has actually been proven that adblockers are environmentally friendly because your computer doesnt have to waste the additional power to generate a bunch of extra, lets be honest, bloatware.
Not to mention the viruses given that no one vets ads or their content. Our collective social promotion of people getting paid through ads when they aren't regulated well or almost at all is absolutely nonsense.
But to play devil's advocate here, if you believe in helping the environment that much then you'd go out and buy a cook book instead.
indeed!
the internet is so cluttered with ads and people trying to drain all your attention while shoving products in your face constantly.... Not enough people talk about this, but I swear that there must be a strong correlation between this stuff and declines in mental health.
The life story doesn't exist for humans to read, it's for SEO. The Web pages are essentially an inefficient ad data feed between machines that humans are a scoring mechanism for.
Thanks capitalism!
Ex-freaking-xactly, even the authors don't wanna put the extra stories, im sure
It's both. two things can be true
@@treydentoo true
You can add tips and tricks without writing 10 irrelevant paragraphs. Not to mention the 100 pop-up ads. Yeah, no I'm with Sabrina on this.
Yep, if genuinely important aspects of the recipe or preparation process are buried in a multi-paragraph blurb, you've simply written your recipe incorrectly.
Yeah a few short paragraphs or one long paragraph is all I have patience for. Anything more than that and it’s overkill.
If I scroll for more than 2 seconds and I’m not at the recipe yet that shit sucks
I'm with Sabrina on this one.. I'm a home cook and studied a bit of cooking, but I'm mainly a developer, and all I have to say is: if you need context, tips and tricks, then the recipe is not correctly written. You can let go of the recipe when you know the recipe as the back of your hand. You have done it SO MANY TIMES that you no longer think about measuring, you can see the proper amount. And it is then that you can modify the recipe to make it your own. But (yes, there is a but), one point is made in the video, someone needs to be paid if you make a website. That is the only point I agree with having ads (though annoying). Other than that, if I want the history, the background, and the context of why the recipe exists, I rather watch cooking shows.
I'm with you fully on this. Sabrina not being able to follow Melissa's instructions doesn't mean that we need the blog, it means that the instructions weren't thoroughly enough. I've written instructions for drug testing, writing good instructions is very much a skill that needs to be developed and good instructions are written in a way where they're clear to people who aren't intimately familiar with the method you're writing for whether it's cooking, home improvement, car maintenance, or chemistry.
I agree! All of that extra info should written into the recipe itself. Not strewn about with your life story. Cooking instruction belongs in the recipe.
Agree, doing bad instructions is no excuse
Were you not around for the early internet? No, these people just do not need to be paid. People will do everything on the internet at their cost because they just like to on the internet. Internet is where we do our hobbies for free. In fact, free websites are the only websites on the internet that consistently have a good user experience.
"Someone needs to get paid" overlooks the competitive game that is SEO. Many of these recipe sites only exist to take recipes that already exist and slap ads on them. They're not adding anything new to the web, they're just displacing some other copy of the same recipe in the search engine rankings. The innovation is not in the quality of the recipe, but in the efficiency of collecting ad revenue.
If you can’t work with just the instructions, then it’s not a complete recipe. And what this leaves out is that I often have an idea of what I’m going to make and why I want it before I go to a food blog recipe. I don’t need the story about nana, because I already have the story of what I want from the recipe. I’m usually there to figure out the key ingredients to see what I missed, and to get a quick idea of what techniques I need to use in the instructions. I often compare three or four recipes, and I don’t want to read every one of those blogs.
And yes, I am a ChefSteps subscriber… and I have a huge book from America’s Test Kitchen.
I guess I don't mind the ending "truce" but this video rubbed me the wrong way. People are frustrated because recipe websites have become borderline unusable. If that's how you make your money, good on you, but I've had to leave recipe blogs because I couldn't get to the recipe. How much am I supposed to appreciate the story behind your dish, when your website refreshes on me halfway through scrolling? It's always an awful experience now.
Also, if you need an essay of "tips and tricks", you should probably just include them in your recipe.
Also, what was with that cooking sequence? Not recognizing the spices? Is there a tip for recognizing spices in the tips section?
This whole video smells like food blog propaganda lol
The people were definitely trying to guilt trip you into reading their articles before the recipe. If I wanted to read anything except the recipe, I would. Don't try and act like your copied-copied-copied recipe deserves to be preceded by your expensive honeymoon story while also your story is God's gift.
My rebuttal to the recipe writers- that’s great you have creative outlet, but what’s stopping you from ingredients and instructions first
@@beefymcskillet5601 If they do that, nobody wants to pay for "below the fold" ad spots. Melissa doesn't seem to understand that for most recipe sites, they really are trying to pad for ad space, and weave the recipe into the rest of the BS just to make it so you HAVE to scroll. Pay-per-impression ads know if they've been seen.
Search Engine Optimisation
Recipes sites are 95% ads and bs. Soon it they all will also be 100% AI, possibly with 100% AI generated BS "family history" of the recipes.
You don't need seperate "tips and tricks" outside of the directions as they should be in the directions if they are needed. Most don't even have "tips and tricks".
It's perfectly fine to add glue and maybe three pebbles to your lasagna
AI recipe sites of the future. Probably.
definitely.
I'm against the paragraphs upon paragraphs of backstory and the inconvenient layout most of the sites have, _but_ this video has convinced me about the value of the Tips and Tricks.
The recipe instructions are just the steps, but some of the steps might include stuff you've never done before, so that's where the tips come in. Once you've learned _how_ to do the step you don't need such a detailed explanation every time you come back to the recipe, so it's actually pretty handy that it's separate. It just needs to be nearer the instructions, not a million miles away with ads in between. Maybe even with optional pop-ups inlined into the instructions - though obviously that's web design beyond the scope of the average blogger.
15:45 … but these are two people who know one another well. I don’t know the person who wrote hollandaise crab rangoon poppers or care how it reminds them of their cousins’ house.
Yeah, no. If important information is missing from the instructions, the recipe is written badly. I appreciate your history, but sometimes I just want to eat.
It never occurred to me the blurb before the recipe could be "real". I always assumed it was SEO and AI word salad.
It often is lol
It's not real
Thats 100% what it is haha
recipe blogs predate easy access to ai??
They do mostly predate AI but they don’t predate paying other people to write your shit, which is a job being taken by AI now.
Sorry, but the only thing I took away from this video is that recipe writers are incredibly defensive when called out over the fact that they don't understand why people look up recipes. Put up a list of ingredients with exact measurements, nothing ambiguous and describe the steps of how to prepare the food. Your "tips" are the things you compile under "techniques", things you can apply in various situations to prepare various foods in a similar manner. Then you write that down once and link to it whenever applicable. You're on the world wide web, use the most fundamental aspect of it, hyperlinks!
That was my reaction too, awful seeing people defend what is essentially an exercise in wasting people's time, because at that point they've already admitted that the viewer doesn't want to see the background. It's people defending crappy industry practices.
this was what i got too, all their points were weird ways of phrasing "I'm bad at writing recipes so I'll blame you if you can't follow my ramble" ... what ?!
6:40
@@matt69nice Welcome to capitalism!
@@3nertia yup, it sucks and so do the people defending it
All the tips and tricks should be included in the recipe and should not be hidden in a novel.
The recipe should be written, like with any instructions, with the mindset that the reader has never done any of it before. So they need to be clear and precise. Proper measurements need to be included too. I get that in professional settings, quantities vary because there are things the chef knows about what needs adjustment, but these recipes should be for people that don't know. And once someone has made the dish a few times they will then start knowing what needs adjustments and can play around with the quantities themselves
The long format instructions shouldn't deviate from the shortened bullet point ones either. Like changing the order an ingredient goes in as you have already started cooking.
And a little background on the dish is appreciated, but so many online recipes contain completely useless and irrelevant ramblings that have nothing to do with the dish.
Tips and tricks may or may not be relevant depending on your ability and knowledge. Also, some things don't make sense in either ingredients or instructions. For example, common errors. Stuff like "if it looks like X, it was probably Y" needs to be separate
At this point I refuse to Google recipes in English. I prefer German recipe websites because it gets to the point so quickly. If I want to read the background story to a dish, I want to read that after I make it. If I don't know how to prepare something or a term is unfamiliar to me, I can just... Google it. The same way I found the recipe in the first place.
So to answer the question, no, I'm not convinced to find online recipes less annoying. If anything, I'm more annoyed than when I watched it. The issue isn't about people not getting their fair pay, it's about actively hindering the user experience. These websites are so poorly laid out and impossible to comfortably navigate that I don't like to Google recipes. I borrow cookbooks from friends or roommates, and I write down recipes that my friends make which I enjoy.
This has the same vibe and pitfalls of hardcore Linux users explaining to new computer users why they should care about the license of their media codec, GPU drivers, install shell plugins, compile the kernel modules in their own image and accept the user experience inconveniences as THE authentic experience of being "proper" Linux users, and only drive away people from using Linux in the process, who'd otherwise be happy with just a functional web browser.
The recipe blurbs may be a creative expression for and by the people, for whom cooking is a creative outlet; but when someone just wants to cook a meal for a change, that just gets in the way.
So when I look up a recipe, I really don't have time to read a 20-page synopsis on how and where the recipe was invented. I just need the recipe. If I can't jump to the recipe, I click off that recipe and go to another. If it turns out to be a great dish, then I might go back and read.
The compromise here, put the story after the recipe not before it.
Especially when the reality is most of the time its there to add important keywords for search engine optimization
Yeah, I have a feeling that recipe writers, including those featured in the video, do not understand why (many) people look for a recipe.
Especially when so many times you scroll past all that bs and find, "adapted from: [actual recipe creator]" so they stole someone else's work and just 'tweaked' it with an extra dash of vanilla or reduced salt from 1/2tsp to 1/4tsp.
@@DreadDeimos It's because the ones here are 'chefs' not 'cooks'. Chefs think of food as art blah blah blah, whereas a cook is just interested in cooking a meal. Most people looking for recipes just want to cook a meal to eat, not go on a pretentious emotional experience.
Yes, I do the same thing except for going back to read it. I had never read the story of a recipe. When I come back to the same page, it's only because the recipe was good and I want to do it again!
Just checked out Melissa's website, and I gotta say, if all the recipe websites look like this, this video might not even exist.
Yeah that website isn't really a valid argument against the annoyance with recipe websites. The annoying ones have many obnoxious ads, and are entire novels worth of irrelevant search engine optimisation and self exposition.
I will admit I never read the fluff prior to websites, I always scroll past it.
@@op4000exe The classic SEO chocolate chip cookie recipe,
My grandma made the Best Chocolate Chip Cookies because she just loved finding Chocolate Chip Cookie recipes and trying out any of the Best Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe she could find. I value that she found the Best Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe and would always make it for me during holidays, birthdays, graduation, any time I needed the Best Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe.
Mike Rugnetta calls the tiny amount of text you get between ads on mobile websites "the content slit." If I'm making something off of a recipe website, I do not want to peer through the content slit.
Yeah her website is what recipe websites SHOULD be; recipe first, background later, and not too long either.
@@talkgoodenglish7500I loved the ideas channel. Is Mike still making content?
These food writers complaints about not getting the specific instructions for a "pinch" or "chunk" from the instructions section, just says they don't know how to provide INSTRUCTIONS! If my math teacher gave me that level of explanation of algebra, I wouldn't know how to do it.
Yes! I have plenty of recipes that say things like 1/2 inch pieces or whatever. You can give size instructions!
"Add an amount of flour"
And it can matter a ton depending on the recipe. Yeah sometimes that extra pinch of salt is negligible. But other times even that little bit extra makes a huge difference. I get annoyed when I ask my mom for recipes and it's all a pinch of this and dash of that and then it turns out disgusting because nothing is actually measured. If there's at least a video then you can see what THEY consider a pinch or a dash or whatever.
Exactly. If your recipe isn't sufficient for me to prepare the dish, then it's badly written.
I can understand complaining about "chunks" but for "pinch" essentially assume add to taste. Legitimately if the recipe has written "pinch" the actual quantity doesn't matter much
I find it very interesting that they challenged her to cook the recipe, and then, when she arrived, she found nothing was labeled and proceeded to cook it on a whim, practically setting herself up for failure.
@2:43 wait what? did i really just watch a 3 minute commercial? and im not even mad, damn good job yall
I think the recipe writers who adds alot of this stuff is misunderstanding the purpose of a recipe. It is a much more utilitarian medium is the vast majority of people.
On one hand: This video did a great job of changing my mind that there is value in the blurbs that come before the recipe.
On the other hand: When that blurb is actually 10 paragraphs where each paragraph is separated by a image as wide as the main column and an ad, yeah no, screw that, give me the recipe, lol.
EDIT: Holy crap, I just randomly searched for jambalaya recipes to try an experiment to average how many scrolls it took me to reach the recipe, and I've thrown that out in favor of one very clear complaint: Why are so many of these images taking up almost all the vertical height of my monitor?! An image alone shouldn't add an entire scroll to the count!
I like how they all gave some flowery excuse as to why the blog actually brings value... and then at the end, they just go "We need it for SEO and ad revenue, deal with it".
Lmao ok. I block ads and just scroll straight down anyways.
it's both though. things can have multiple layers to them and multiple reasons. there is use in the top tips, some people may get inspiration from hearing the stories.
it cant just be ad revenue because books also have some flowery nonsense thats not 100% nessacary.
@@ThePurpleCheesecakeZebra But it's probably mostly ad revenue because with books, the blurbs tend to be pretty short.
The thing is, we don't want to know about the person by default. We only need to cook something. It's like searching google maps for the direction and getting told about what that building means to whoever that entered the entry in the Google maps database. Nonsense.
I'll be honest. I usually skip Melissa's videos because they are not for me, and I accidentally clicked it thinking it was Sabrina's video.
So, what you're saying is the instructions were incomplete, which caused difficulties in cooking.
Nah, I also don’t care what story led to you having this recipe. I’d rather the story was a box with a “read more” button. If you can’t get everything you need from the ingredients, it was made poorly. I’ve gone through plenty with the tips and tricks being in parentheses in the instructions. Ingredient lists with an optional section.
the thing is, most recipe websites aren't representative of the bloggers Melissa brought in to interview. most of them have stolen recipes and AI padding slop.
when reading a recipe made by an actual human, you'll usually find that the preceding text is no longer than two paragraphs, sometimes down to a sentence, then the insights are within the body text of the instructions.
you don't need a 900-word text before each recipe for it to be meaningful and human. that's only done to pad the website for ads.
Lots are white ppl “recreating” that amazing dish they had on vacation. Or putting their “I need to feed 6 kids on a weeknight ‘spin’” on other cultures recipes.
Do these people google things from the perspective of an average internet goer? Seems like they have their heads up their 🍑 (and I love netshaq)
Also for copyright. Copyright requires a recipe to have "substantial literary expression" included, so the only way to protect your recipe is to include a bunch of garbage with it.
@@crossboy I was honestly expecting this video to explain that bit, or at least discuss whether this is actually the case or just a folk myth.
I've always felt like if a prominent "Skip to recipe" was standard, or the "Backstory" and "Recipe" sections were in collapsible foldouts, there would be far less to worry about.
There's merit to the monologue, but sometimes you just want a recipe, and neither is right or wrong
I'm gonna be honest here, the fact that I heard the pitch for Sabrina's website and desperately wanted it to be real shows that food bloggers really do need to rethink how they present their recipes online. I get that they need ads to get paid and want to share their thoughts about the recipe to give some context, but scrolling for 3/4 of the page just to get to a recipe that's 5 ingredients long is excessive. If you have tips about how to prepare certain parts of the recipe, include them in the actual instructions!
It's like the argument around online piracy. Yes piracy is wrong but if its easier to access the pirated content than the actual legit sources (and this is not just about paying for stuff), then people are going to use those services. The solution here is to rethink how the information is presented on the website.
A lot of the takes from these chefs / writers don't hold up to scrutiny. I'm an animator by trade, and when I wrote a book about animation, I had to deeply think through what I do and how I do it. That way, I could clearly explain animation to people who were doing it for the first time.
My approach to "creating animation" is *not* the same as my approach to "explaining animation to the average person". The goal was not for readers to get professional results on their first (or even 100th) try, but for them to get results, period.
If an author is excluding or obfuscating part of a recipe under the pretense of "well, professionals just have an inherent understanding of xyz", then they haven't done their job thoroughly.
As a journalist, brevity and getting to the point are critical. As an IT guy, I hate seeing ads, fluff and poor formatting keeping me from the details I need.
I'm all for Sabrina's tool. Nobody says people - or AI - can't create the websites, no matter how unpopular, but I don't want to spend 20 minutes in the supermarket trying to find a list of ingredients. At that point, I'll ignore your recipe and move on to someone else's.
As a software developer, I concur. Good design is extremely crucial and you should always be putting things in the perspective of the end-user. Well-thought out design can allow you to both have your cake and eat it too. As an astronomer- reading fatigue is a real thing and information density is always preferred when it's not for entertainment purposes.
I think recipe writers are being defensive to the reaction that most people don't give a crap about what they write, most people just want the recipe. They seem to believe a blog entry will ADD to people's experience, and maybe it could if that's what people were looking for, but frankly, it isn't. People want to make good food for themselves, not read about the journey to make it, or where it came from. Literally doesn't matter to most people. Certainly doesn't to me. There's a place for all that, but IMO what you're writing isn't a recipe, it's a blog with a recipe in it, and I'm not here for a blog.
Agreed! Imagine reading just about any other instructional manual written the way food blogs are written and trying to follow it ... 🤣
Sure, write about the recipe to sell the concept of it, sell the expectation with a (yes, singular) good photo, but keep the instructions in the instructions and keep them concise.
I think we live in a time when people believe that their life story has some intrinsic value. They’ve been told they’re special, so obviously everyone wants to hear about their dog, their favorite color, and every other mundane detail before they get down to the business of cooking. They forget that we’re not friends hanging out and cooking together. I came looking for a recipe, and the recipe is the only thing of value in this transaction. The rest is just pointless fluff, and I care just as much about the author’s life story as they do about mine.
@@kenrickman6697 now there's an idea. leave comments (if the site has them) with your life story, ending with why that is relevant to how much you enjoyed the recipe. Maybe they'll get the point. :p
@ If I could include pop up ads which only affect the author, I’d do that in a heartbeat!
Agreed. The whole "I can't write specific amounts, it ruins my ~flow~" but was so pretentious as well.
I don't usually write comments before I finish the video in case my thought or question gets mentioned and discussed later on, but I can't wait for that.
I think Melissa missed the point of what Sabrina is proposing and why she and Taha think it's a good idea. Sabrina is proposing a TOOL that is OPTIONAL TO USE for those that just want to skip straight to the recipe. When I look up recipes, I'm either a) really hungry or b) planning ahead. I don't stop to read the story behind the recipe because it will not help me achieve my goal of finding something I can make later (or immediately in the case of situation "a") and I'm normally not interested in reading that wall of text.
I don't think Sabrina and Taha are saying the fluff piece, story, explanation of the food, etc. should be eliminated (Edit: I was partially wrong). I think they just want to create a tool that ppl like me would find extremely useful. If ppl want to read the wall of text that comes before a recipe, then they can totally do that and not use the tool (recipe cleaner website). The tool is there if you want to use it, not to force others into a certain way of thinking.
Edit: The compromise to put the background/story after the recipe is a great one. Personally, I think understanding where food came from and hearing how it relates to a person and their culture is cool. But in the narrow context of recipe searching, I do not care. It be different if I was cooking with a friend and they had a story related to the food we were making, for example.
this. If I'm looking for a recipe and there is just fluff-- I'VE HIT THE BACK BUTTON
The scroll is how they get their money and such, luckily Answer in progress have their youtube as their main income seemingly and are not online chefs who those ads help get them paid,
They definitely landed more on the ethics behind releasing a tool that actively takes away people's income, I'm sure anyone could make it and release a tool similar to this, more just that this group decided they did not want that morality of actively taking away income streams from people who put in effort to make things, especially knowing quite a few.
Would be like if they released a tool that skips youtubers ad reads or blocked their refferal links, stuff like that already does exist, but these people morally wouldn't want to be responsible to do that along with their influence, especially knowing what it's like working in that space themselves.
@@rachele183 I'll still load the site, which loads all the ads... then copy and paste the link into the tool and read it there. The ads still got their view.
Ohh I get it, the fact that the video is riddled with ads is also a part of the recipe experience!
My biggest problem with recipe sites is that they seem to always make a popup or scroll away for no reason, while I’m cooking. I’ve got cooking hands, don’t make me touch my laptop! It’s not just work ahead of time to find the recipe, it’s additional mental and time load when trying not to incinerate my food.
Also, if there’s any tips, PUT IT IN THE ORDERED INSTRUCTIONS! I AM BAD AT REMEMBERING!!! I started to copy recipes into my notes app and add my own customizations, tips, and to taste amounts. It’s helpful for me to be consistently successful.
The actual video starts at 17:06
Okay, everyone with sponsorskip need to do others a solid and actually mark everything before then as fluff
😂😂😂 This is the spiciest comment here!! I'm xD
Thanks, finished the video
As someone who 1) hates when my ability to READ the recipe is thwarted by ads/website jumping around and 2) is learning to cook bc he wasn't taught to cook as a child, I have found that I benefit most from following a recipe to the letter, ignoring the context prior to the story. Then after I make it a couple of times, I start to feel comfortable playing around with more/less ingredients. I don't have the knowledge to be able to randomly grab things and randomly measure.
I'm like right in the middle of the road here. I'm with Sabrina on the cutting out the "fluff", but with Melissa on the tips and tricks and like a little background to really set the scene (for both of her recipes it looked like she only had a paragraph or so explaining the context and that's fine. Love the compromise of context after the recipe! Love y'all's videos. ☺
I find the same with recipes, but I think this idea might help you if you haven't already thought of it: the ones I like the most, I like to print them out and then I can write my variations on them in pen or pencil. I've got a few recipes where I've altered the level of garlic or tomato soup or some other thing like that, or else if the recipe calls for a clove of garlic, I've written down the equivalent measure of powdered garlic, which keeps much better on my shelf.
Also, congrats on teaching yourself to cook. It can be really intimidating, and I know a few people who didn't feel they learned much cooking as a kid and were too scared to try so far as adults. I hope you have much success.
I don't understand why the tips and tricks can't be included in the instructions where they should be.
gotta fundamentally disagree with the argument of "if you go to a recipe *blog* you cannot be upset when someone talks about their vacation" I clicked it because it was the top result on a search engine for the recipe I was searching for and all the keyword stuffing on that page pushed a bunch of blogs into my recipe search. that's it that's my nitpick otherwise this really good insight into how that happens
I completely agree. They know they're doing SEO to push their page to the top of results, but the content isn't actually what someone making that search wants to find. You shouldn't get a good page rank if the post is entirely irrelevant.
It's like saying "if you pick up a fiction book, you can't complain that it tells a story instead of facts" when you asked the librarian for books about dinosaur anatomy and they bring back fairy tales about dinosaurs instead of books that talk about dinosaur anatomy. If I could filter out food blogs and just see recipe pages, problem solved. But if I want a recipe for soda bread, I'm practically forced to sift through autobiographies before I can get to the recipe and that's rightfully annoying
@@generalcodsworth4417 Just to continue the analogy, I feel like in this case you blame the librarian no? It’s not the writer’s fault that their fairy tale about dinosaurs with some fun facts about anatomy sprinkled in is what the librarian decided to give. The book is what it is advertised to be, a food blog. Being annoyed that food blogs get pushed by search engines when you actually want plain recipes is understandable, but that is a SEO problem intrinsically
I agree; most of these sites are branded as an online recipe WEBSITE not a blog.
@@Zalda_ The blogs are using SEO optimization to show up in searches for recipes, because they wouldn't make nearly as much money if they were realistically advertised as personal story blogs. So in the analogy, the book publishers are telling the library that they are dinosaur anatomy books. Should the librarian be better at checking? Sure. But the publishers also know exactly what they're doing when taking advantage of the stupidity of the librarian.
This isn't even the biggest problem about online recipes. The BIGGEST problem is all feedback is in the form: This recipe is (good/bad/whatever). Here are the 7 changes I made to it when I tried it.
Tips and tricks should be part of the actual recipe. The word salad junk is completely irrelevant and purely there to create space to have ads
The problem is that everybody needs to eat, and most people don't want to read a stranger's art.
those people dont want to make art either. it doesnt matter if they see the recipe because they have no want to improve their cooking skills they just want to know what goes into a lasdagne, and that info is easy to find anywhere
I want to read people's art when I'm looking for art, not when I'm looking for a recipe.
7 minutes in and I am the opposite of convinced. None of this make it any less annoying.
So the reason why I would want a recipe cleaner is because during the week, I have little time to myself, I just want to make the food, eat, watch my RUclips videos while I eat, and then do shit that I actually want to do afterwards. If it's the weekend and I have nothing to do, I'll read the blog, If I don't have that much time I'm not reading all that.
There is a site called just the recipe for this purpose if you need
there is also buying recipe books that give you the recipe you want on a page, but nooooo you are too lazy to do that, and you want other people's efforts for free
I'm so glad that the "jump to recipe" button is becoming more common. I like having the choice if it's a recipe I've used before or that's straightforward to skip to it. I particularly use it if I'm tossing up between two recipes and want to quickly compare the ingredients so I can't pick the one that suits what I've got in the pantry already. The fluff is helpful for tricky things, but it really gets in the way sometimes.
What I am really seeing is two entirely different use cases. I love the idea of following some person and their story.... but if I know what I want to make and just want to know how to make it.... I want a functional recipe. I want something I can work with. All that cultural stuff gets in the way when I want a functional document.
"We talked to a bunch of people who make annoying recipe websites. And they said it's okay to do the annoying thing. Case closed."
i feel like this take glosses over the core point of "this is necessary to make this free thing while still compensating the people who's labor created it". NYT Cooking has a ton of recipes that do exactly what everyone complaining in these comments wants, no fluff, straight to instructions, no ads. But it's paid, because that takes work to research, create, and curate a collection of recipes like that.
It's honestly kind of insane to expect a premium experience for free, like do people think that someone who works as a food writer doesn't deserve to make a living? If the adds and stories bother you so much, support a writer or a chef and get a subscription to a recipe site or ffs just buy an actual cookbook.
@@yusufvangieson6157 ++
ok but did you even /try/ to check out the "bunch of people who make annoying recipe websites"? if you look at the people she's interviewed, they are all legit bloggers, writers, and chefs. maybe listen to the 6:20 segment, is my kind suggestion. and perhaps 9:50, if you're feeling reflective. dftba.
@@bhangela I'd have way more respect for this video and the people in it if it was a straightforward and honest video about how terrible and obnoxious all the SEO/ad optimization they have to put in there is in order to make money. What they have seems really disingenuous.
We all have to do crappy stuff to pay the bills. If they focused more on that instead of all the weak justifications and a poorly thought out "experiment", I think people would have more sympathy.
@@yusufvangieson6157 Because that is a begging the question style argument. Do we have to let these people extract profit from us? Uhh, no, never. We never agreed to that.
Yes it takes work to run and fill a website but people do it all of the time on the internet, and they were very popular until the capitalists rushed in and used SEO to bury the free blogs with the trash. We had recipe sharing hobbyists before we had these predators. Damn near every program on my computer was given to me gratis by kind programmers. How can we live in a world where Blender is free but a recipe for mashed potatoes comes with 410,757,864,530 ads?
I know the reality of why the the sites want to keep you there for ads revenue. But the food writers they interviewed I think have a very insular view of the role of food in people lives. For them it`s culture and history and passion and their whole lives. For most people though food is "Lasagna yummy! I´d like to eat a Lasagna and I have an hour to make that happen before I need to return to my life!" Most people aren`t looking for a culinary and cultural food journey in their daily lives.
But it would be neat if we had the time to go on those journeys.
Lasagna in an hour is stressfull
Also I dont' need your story, author, if I already have my own.
Like a few weeks ago I wanted to try my hand making a kind of cake that I used to eat all the time when I was living in east Texas in my early 20s. I went to look up a recipe for it and every single result hand paragraph after paragraph accompanying the recipe that I had to dig through before I could even find out which type of cake it was (since there are two end results for it which are pretty different but have the same name)
yes indeed! While most will probably agree on, that eating itself can be really nice, many if these people won't agree on the act of cooking is.
Like, some people may enjoy programming a custom website with handcrafted database access.
Others are just happy that certain special websites exists, and use them
Or setting up and configuring gameservers, while others just want to play with friends on a server.
Or reparing old, broken devices.. the list goes on
If a person has as little time as you say they wouldn’t be looking at a recipe to cook a lasagna from scratch
At that point they would just heat up a store bought frozen stouffer’s lasagna that only takes an hour to heat up
I would absolutely love to see someone butcher a whole chicken for the first time with only the instructions found in a recipe that was written for SEO, like almost every recipe online is.
For food preparation like that I would say a recipe is not useful. Even the extra fluff isn't going to get you the details needed for how to prepare things properly. But once you learn how to quarter a chicken, dice an onion, mince some garlic then the recipes that call for 1 diced onion and a whole quartered chicken make a lot more sense. Like if I need to learn how to julienne a carrot properly, I'm not going to the recipe fluff, I'm finding a youtube video to watch the technique.
The thing is, if you're a first timer in butchering a chicken. Regardless of the layout and content of the recipe, you're not gonna do it perfectly. It is a skill you gained through time
that was my thoughts. I've never seen one that goes into any of the stuff Sabrina needed help with
I'm gonna greatly offend a lot of people now, but cooking doesn't need to be that precise. You will not ruin your meal by using a large potato instead of a medium. You will not make it uneadible by leaving out one spice. You don't need the life story to make a meal. You need guidance and inspiration - and when you're new in the kitchen, direction. Tips and tricks should not be sprinkled into the story, but have their own place - furthermore, they are tips and tricks, to make things easier, quicker, better. Not mandatory to read or incorporate.
Baking is another story because that is like chemistry.
The food writers here are completely delusional!
As someone who just started to learn how to cook in the last year, I can confirm, that the tips and photos buried in all the other stuff up top CAN be helpful. That said, when the post is so long, the pictures are so numerous, the tips & tricks section is there, the recommended other recipes are there, AND there's ads spliced throughout, a lot of the blogs become nearly unusable. I have an ad blocker and even still I have to simply give up on the site. I agree bloggers need to make money, there just needs to be a better way. Because you aren't going to make money if I simply cannot use the site.
This didn't feel like an AnswersInProgress video, it felt like a 17 minute long ad
It's heavily integrated yeah, but I don't feel like they would have changed much about the video without the ad
Yeah it was a really poor quality video I hope the next one isn't this bad
@sarahaque1382 I feel like the only flaw was that they lost the plot when Sabrina came over to cook. Otherwise it was fine
Real video starts at 9:52 when he says the thing. You're welcome everyone.
Thanks. I only came here to learn the facts of the matter.
Ketchup
this comments section could really use some self-awareness re: the 9:46 timestamp lmao....
The main issue is just better structure, i don't like sitting in the grocery parking lot, on my way home from work, scrolling for what i need to buy when it could just be a simple easy found list of at least the minimum things i will need with optional ingredients labeled appropriately. You were taught how to write reports in school for a reason, they are easy to understand
1. Intro/history, but try to keep it a reasonable length
2. 2 lists, ingredients, and tools. Doesn't even need to be precise (tsp, etc.). You don't buy cumin by the pinch. I just need to know that I need it
3. Prep, properly titled for easy visibility, through in a story about cutting vegetables with your grandma if you want, but then have a distinct subtitle and section for the actual instructions, this can include tips and tricks.
4. Do the same as 3 for cooking and presentation
5. Conclusion/final thoughts
This is why I screen cap the list of ingredients beforehand lmao
@Artofcarissa half the time, they aren't even in a list though, just mixed into the paragraphs
@@morgancrooks no I mean the list of ingredients in the actual recipe part
If you cannot cook the food with JUST the recipe, the recipe is bad and should be ignored or rewritten to get rid of all the extraneous trash.
"Stewing size" or "a pinch", for example, are hallmarks of a shitty recipe. They are meaningless.
They need to be rewritten to "one inch chunks" and "1/16th of a teaspoon"
That's all there is to it.
All these food bloggers' excuses are worthless.
I say this as someone who actually write recipes.
All the people trying to get others to cook: "It's super easy, just follow a recipe, anyone can do it!"
This video: "It's super elitist actually, you'll only ever ACTUALLY know how to cook through YEARS of experience and dedication, you can't cook unless you know that my grandmother in Cambodia used 3 fist fulls of canolli in her super special wonder dish, and you won't know what a fist full is unless you read my blog!"
(I make this as a joke, this video actually makes some good points and I do think the compromise at the end would be a good one, but I just found the dichotomy amusing)
Thank you for the last bit. Helped my nurodivergant butt out with understanding lol
Dude, I feel the same, even if it was a joke. I firmly think cooking is a huge part of life and making good tasting meals is important. I despise elitism in general, but definitely in something so ubiquitous as food.
Last thing I want to feel is someone telling me that I need soul in my cooking or need to understand cultural relevance or how I couldn't possibly appreciate it, but here it is I guess a plebian can try it.
That's not fun. That makes me actively not want to use their recipe.
If I'm a parent, who is hungry, with two children who are also hungry and it's 5:30 pm I'm not going to carefully parse through paragraphs of a diary entry and what feels like an infinite amount of ads that all seem to be videos to cook a recipe. I'm tired and hungry and need to feed folks before 7pm. Give. Me. The. Recipe. This. Is. Annoying.
I feel like if it's 5:30 PM and you and your kids are all hungry, you'd just go with a dish you already know how to cook, no? Recipe blogs are for people who have time to prep and buy the listed ingredients.
then buy a recipe book or learn how to cook. Stop being an entitled mombrat
Or you want to make something different today so you look up some easy to make recipes online. Many meals can be comfortably made in under an hour.
My ideal recipe blog post has a few quick facts at the top: number of portions, prep/cook time, how well it reheats. Then one paragraph about the dish, a link to further information (e.g. the long post with the backstory, or a video, or a relevant book or restaurant) then the utensils (very important and not something that even most cookbooks do) and ingredients lists, including substitution ideas, then the steps, then a list of notes about potential mistakes. So.... I'm arguing for the middle ground.
And the best part of my ideal is that the blog author can link to a longer blog post about the dish that links back to the recipe and that boosts their placement in the search algorithms
I would be quite happy if online recipes followed that structure
How well it reheats would be such a helpful piece of info. So mnay foods change after being refrigerated
The problem with most food blogs is the writer wants you to value what they value, and you don't have the time or energy to care. You just want that recipe. This creates, at best, a mediocre experience for the user. at worst, it's infuriating. As a UX designer (as well as a cook and writer) here's how I'd fix the problem. Keep the beautiful photos, those add lots of value. Put the recipe right at the top, with a section for tips and tricks directly below or beside it (make sure the header is large enough to be noticable. Then place the family story below that, in a small column on the side, or under a dropdown box. It's there but not in the way. Place ads anywhere they won't be in the way, like at the bottom or sides, not in between or on top of important information. Avoid annoying pop up ads that you have to click out of like the plague. Test the site with multiple users, see what they do and how they feel about it, and make adjustments accordingly. At this point people will probably want to spend much more time on your site than they did before because you showed them you understand what they actually want from the site and didn't make it difficult
I’m not a chef by trade, I don’t have that intuitive understanding of ratios and potency. I know I’m not gonna make chef level cooking but I do expect my recipes to tell me how to cook the recipe in a way where I don’t need to be professional to understand. You don’t have to teach me the basics, I can learn those on my own, but measurements help me to understand what I need to do. If vital info isn’t in the ingredients list or the recipe instructions then that’s a badly written recipe.
I barely started the video but that’s what I absolutely hate about english internet recipes. You have to scroll through all that text to finally get to even see the ingredients. You can also click a barely visible button to jump to the recipe but it’s always so annoying. I’m from Poland and if polish internet recipes even have an introduction it’s very brief. You literally just scroll once and you’re there. Hopefully the video at least explains why it happens
You also don't really want to be clicking buttons because it could be an ad, I think I've basically trained myself not to see ads, which might explain why I've never seen one of those buttons 😅
I'm going to learn Polish so I can browse these recipes you speak of XD
As you probably know by now, you're initial assumption was correct and it only gets more infuriating as the video goes on.
recipe sites literally crash my phone browser now. someone needs to stop them.
My reason for not enjoying the "tips and tricks" is that I approach recipes much like I do home cooking - at 14:00 Frankie and Joanne mention grabbing things, and throwing things into a wok -- that's how a lot of people use recipes as well - grab 4-5-6 different recipes for the same thing, pick out the parts they like better and make something different. Having the tips and tricks in that case feels like a disorganized home kitchen - you need to go through a ton of pots and pans to get to the spices you want to throw in the wok.
Respectfully, the only people you found who would agree that there is value in the story attached to each recipe are the people who have vested interests in that value existing. The recipes themselves do have value, as evidenced by websites and creators existing who publish recipes behind paid services but then keep the format simplistic without the bloat necessary to slip infinite intrusive, site-breaking ads into the page.
The real issue is that there isn't a consistent standard of writing for the majority of recipes on the internet. As someone who does a significant amount of recipe writing for a professional kitchen. I can tell you the majority of people leave out easily defined parameters in ingredient listings, and recipe instructions. Also a lot of recipes are to ubiquitous in size/measurement terminology. Good recipes have a weight measurement for every ingredient, trim loss, cook loss, total yield weight of ingredients before and after cooking, and a suggested portion size (in weight) with nutritional information for that portion. Then clearly defined instructions for the prep of each ingredient and the steps (with "tips and tricks" written into the applicable step) That way I don't need to dig through a large blog post to find a critical step not even written in the instructions. This would make cooking an internet recipe a lot more consistent. I don't mind a food blog. and I enjoy reading a story. But there is nothing stopping someone from A. putting the recipe at the top of the page, and B. adding all important information to the recipe first and then to the blog later as well.
Sorry for ranting lol.
0:18 The names in the video call:
"Answer in Progress"
"Answer in Progress"
"Taha"
Gotta make a website to be called AiP!
I fully agree with the points in this video! Especially the food it looks delicious lol. However, I will say that to me the issue isn’t the fact that the ads are there, but rather that the ads can sometimes be so intrusive that the website breaks, which makes me not want to read the blurb or try out the recipe.
meanwhile, in ad-blocker country...
@ oh i use ad-blockers galore. But ultimately the primary place I look for recipes is on my phone, which I’m assuming is how most people are also looking for recipes. If you know a great mobile ad-blocker that doesn’t also want an insane subscription fee, please share.
@electricaaaaaaa3260 Firefox on Android with unblock origin
Because people use adblockers (looking at you ^^) and webpage ads pay so little, it's the only way I make it sustainable and free.
If they weren't as annoying, they wouldn't pay as much, and the website wouldn't be up at all
Brave browser is built around an ad blocker, and Kiwi supports desktop browser extensions. Brave I hesitate to recommend these days because you have to turn off half a dozen things they've added to try monetizing the project, but once those items are turned off it's a great experience.
This is a masterclass of fallacies. It's cute how you tried to use arguments to justify the real reason why recipes are long: SEO. If your customers are majorly telling you that the reading is unnecessary, guess what - it is unnecessary
thank you
This needs to be higher up - this is the real reason.
I think you missed the point
Your point is the extra stuff helps you make the recipe. That info should be in the actual recipe section because it’s cooking instructions. It’s dumb that it’s not.
Summary: It's because of ad revenue and because the writer is making the web page for themself instead of for the reader.
Additional Tips & Tricks can either be hidden in a collapsable section or beneath the recipe.
The novel portion is unnecessary. This video says anywhere from 1 sentence to 2 paragraphs.
That is an understatement. I've seen it go on for pages and pages before the actual recipe is shown.
What is helpful:
Photos of the finished product
User reviews from people who tried following the recipe, plus their own photos.
My rule is that if I open a page and can see the beginning of the recipe below the chatter, I'll read it. 'Cause the fact it's not running off the page tells me it's a reasonable length. A few paragraphs _formatted_ ? I'll read. A block of text with no formatting for readability and the scroll bar is 16th of an inch tall...? I'm clicking 'Back' and going elsewhere. 99% of that page is about to be blather.
we need such cleaner for every damn page now! Cookies, pop-ups, subscribe, discount, automatically video playing, advertisement, audio-noise… I'm going crazy, I just need my information, just answer on my question! I really think it's a huge problem now with everything online.
Note *
placing ads for being paid at the recipe page or RUclips channel - I understand, I agree. Photos for each cooking step is extremely useful; if in instruction written “prepare a chicken” and then next step “fry it in the pan”, it's actually not a tip how prepare a chicken, but a part of the instruction. But when on pages everything jumping at you or starts telling “full history of the potato” before giving a recipe, I see it as an issue.
My cooking tip. Don't make my sister's mistake. When they say "grease the bottom of the pan" they mean the bottom of the inside
Have she ever cooked before?
@@larry_face_uwu at that time no.
Is your last name Bedelia by any chance 😅
@Farimira no
My usual gripe with annoying recipe websites stems down to the usability of the website goes down the drain super hard when I can barely touch the screen to scroll because new adds keeps popping up in places, moving text around or jumping to different places on the page. I love to learn where food comes from, and I do research that regulary without even looking at specific recipes, but if I am looking up recipes and many of them are actively wasting my time in almost predatory adds and making their sites really hard to use - then I stop caring for their story and how they got their recipe. If I don't find your recipe page easy to read, comfortable to use, then I will just close it down almost immediatly
i totally agree with what jon kung said. i dont cook professionally, but i cook almost all the meals i eat for about 25 years now, and i also never measure anything. its all about vibes. but when im trying out something new and just need a bit of reassurance, i often do a quick web search on what ingredient combinations other people use for a specific dish. i know that the flavor text is kinda important in general, but personally, i only briefly look at the ingredients list, not even at the measured amounts, and im good. so for me personally, a recipe cleaner would save a bit of time. but i also know i am probably not part of the main audience of these recipe sites ^^
the last new thing i created was a pasta sauce that consists 40% of fried apple stripes and it is just mindblowing. i thought about publishing the recipes i came up with over time online, but the translation into a list of measured amounts of ingredients is killing the vibes so hard for me that i just cant do it... maybe i should start a cooking youtube channel instead :D
can I hear more about the apple pasta sauce?